*50 -T.  v1  IX 


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I    °C^8     2925     ! 
TRIP  TO  ENGLAND 


BY 


GOLDWIN    SMITH,  D.C.L. 


J  3 

j>    J         J, 


«  O  »-,  *        9      °     ,     "     J     J  3 


NEW  YORK 

MACMILLAN    AND    COMPANY 

AND  London 

i8q2 


Copyright,  1892, 
By  MACMILLAN  AND  CO. 


Typography  by  J.  S.  Gushing  &  Co.,  Boston,  I'.S.A. 


Press  work  bv  Berwick  &  Smith, 


b351 


A   TEIP   TO   ENGLAND. 


IT  seems  useful  in  visiting  a  country  to 
have  not  only  a  guide  to  places  and 
routes,  but  a  framework  for  observations 
and  recollections.  Otherwise  the  effect 
produced  on  the  retina  of  the  mind  is  apt 
to  be  like  that  produced  by  a  whirl  of  suc- 
cessive sights  on  the  retina  of  the  eye. 
This  is  particularly  the  case  when  the  ob- 
jects of  interest  are  of  so  many  different 
kinds  as  they  are  in  England.  To  furnish 
such  a  framework  is  the  limited  aim  of  this 
paper,  which  is  an  expansion  of  a  lecture 
delivered  to  friends. 

The  voyage  to  England  is  now  easy 
enough,  barring  that  curious  little  malady 
which  still  defies  medical  science  to  trace 
its  cause  and  is  so  capricious  in  its  range, 
often  taking  the  strong  and  leaving  the 
weak.  There  is  nothing  to  be  said  about 
the  voyage.  Only,  as  we  career  over  those 
wild  waters  in  a  vast  floating  hotel  at  the 

5 


6  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAXD. 

rate  of  five  liundred  miles  a  day,  let  us  pay 
a  tribute  to  the  brave  hearts  which  first 
crossed  them  in  mere  boats  "without  charts 
or  science  of  navigation.  In  the  marvel- 
lous strides  which  of  late  years  humanity 
has  taken,  nothing  is  more  marvellous  or 
more  momentous  than  the  unification  of 
the  world  by  the  extinction  of  distance. 
Already  we  have  made  one  harvest :  we  are 
fast  making  one  mind  and  one  heart  for  the 
world. 

As  an  old  country,  England  perhaps  is 
naturally  regarded  first  from  the  historical 
point  of  view,  and  especially  by  us  of  whose 
history  she  is  the  scene,  whose  monuments 
and  the  graves  of  whose  ancestors  she 
holds.  It  is  an  advantage  which  Canadians 
have  over  Americans  that  they  have  not 
broken  with  their  history  and  cast  off  the 
influences,  at  once  exalting  and  sobering, 
which  the  record  of  a  long  and  grand  fore- 
time exerts  upon  the  mind  of  a  community. 
An  American  has  no  history  before  the 
Revolution,  which  took  place  at  the  end  of 
the  last  century.  In  his  parlance,  "Revo- 
lutionary ' '  denotes  that  which  is  most 
ancient :  it  is  to  the  American  the  equiva- 
lent for  "Xorman."  He  says  that  the 
"  Revolutionary  "  so  and  so  was  his  ances- 


HISTORICAL    BlUTAIX.  7 

tor,  as  an  English  nobleman  would  say- 
that  his  ancestors  came  in  with  the  Con- 
quest. 

Looking  at  the  subject  historically,  we 
have  the  England  of  the  ancient  Britons, 
Roman  England,  Saxon  England,  the  Eng- 
land of  the  Middle  Ages,  the  England  of 
the  Tudors,  the  England  of  the  Stuarts,  the 
England  of  Anne  and  the  Georges,  all  rep- 
resented by  their  monuments.  Of  the 
primitive  habits  of  the  Britons  we  have 
monuments  in  hut- circles  of  British  vil- 
lages still  to  be  seen  on  Exmoor,  where  the 
wild  stag  finds  a  shelter,  and  on  wolds  and 
downs,  near  Whitby  or  Marlborough,  where 
the  traces  of  the  primeval  world  have  not 
yet  been  effaced  by  the  plough.  Of  their 
wild  tribal  wars  we  have  monuments  in  the 
numerous  earthworks,  once  forts  or  places 
of  refuge  for  the  tribe,  which  crown  many 
a  hill  and  of  which  perhaps  the  largest  and 
most  striking  is  the  triple  rampart  of 
"Maiden  Castle  "  on  a  hill  near  Dorches- 
ter. Of  their  dark  and  bloody  superstition 
and  of  the  blind  submissiveness  to  priestly 
power  still  characteristic  of  the  race,  we 
have  a  monument  in  Abury,  with  its  ave- 
nues of  huge  stones  and  the  great  circu- 


8  A   TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

lar  earthwork  from  which,  if  the  antiqua- 
ries are  right,  a  dense  ring  of  awe-struck 
worshippers  gazed,  perhaps  by  night,  on  the 
mystic  forms  of  the  priests  moving  among 
the  sacrificial  fires  ;  and  another  in  Stone- 
henge,  which  seems  ahnost  certainly  to  have 
been  a  temple,  and  which  though  it  may 
somewhat  disappoint  in  size  will  not  disap- 
point in  weirdness,  if  you  see  it,  as  it  should 
be  seen,  on  a  dark  evening  when  it  stands 
amidst  a  number  of  other  primeval  relics 
on  the  lonely  expanse  of  Salisbury  Plain. 
Of  the  taste  and  skill  in  decoration  where- 
with the  Celtic  race  was  more  largely 
gifted  than  with  any  faculty  or  quality 
which  helps  to  form  the  solid  basis  of  civ- 
ilization, we  have  proofs  in  the  golden 
torques  and  other  ornaments,  found  in  bar- 
rows, of  which  the  Celtic  museum  at  Dub- 
lin displays  a  glittering  array.  Sepulchral 
barrows  also  abound,  and  are  memorials  at 
once  of  loyal  reverence  for  chieftainship 
and  of  the  early  craving  for  posthumous 
fame.  The  interest  of  Celtic  monuments 
and  antiquities  belongs  not  merely  to  the 
past.  They  are  the  records  of  a  race  which 
still  lives,  with  much  of  its  original  charac- 
ter, both  political  and  religious,  in  those 
parts   of  the  two  islands  Avhere   the   Celt 


THE    CELTS.  9 

found  refuge  in  natural  fastnesses  from  the 
sword  of  the  Saxon  conqueror  —  in  the  hill 
country  of  Devonshire  and  Cornwall,  in  the 
Welsh  mountains  and  the  Highlands  of 
Scotland,  but  above  all  in  Ireland,  where 
the  w^eaker  race  was  sheltered  by  the  sea. 
The  history  of  England  from  one  point  of 
view  may  be  regarded  as  a  long  effort  to 
impart  the  political  sentiments  and  institu- 
tions of  the  Anglo-Saxon  to  the  remnants 
of  the  Celtic  population.  In  Cornwall  and 
Devonshire  and  m  the  Highlands  of  Scotland 
this,  thanks  to  the  co-operation  of  Protes- 
tantism with  Constitutionalism,  has  been  in 
large  measure  achieved :  in  AVales  the  work 
is  less  complete,  the  Welsh  in  the  more 
mountainous  districts  retaining  with  the 
language  much  of  the  original  character  of 
their  race.  The  Irish  question,  which  is 
mainly  one  of  race,  is  in  all  its  perplexity 
still  before  us. 

Of  the  Roman  Empire,  Britain  was  the  re- 
motest Western  Province,  the  last  won  and 
the  first  lost,  the  one  which  imbibed  least 
of  the  Roman  civilization.  The  monuments 
of  Roman  occupation  are  proportionate  in 
scale,  and  will  not  bear  comparison  with 
Verona,  Aries,  or  Treves  ;  yet  they  wear 
the  majestic  impress  of  the  Empire,  which 


lO  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

built  as  if  it  were  eternal.  Between  the 
Solway  and  the  Tyne  are  seen  the  massive 
remains  of  the  great  Koman  wall,  the 
western  wing  of  a  line  of  defences  which 
guarded  civilization  against  the  inroads  of 
barbarism  from  the  Solway  to  the  Eu- 
phrates. In  different  parts  of  the  country 
may  still  be  traced  the  Roman  roads,  which 
run  straight  and  regardless  of  obstacles  as 
the  march  of  Roman  ambition  itself,  and 
which,  extending  over  the  whole  of  the 
world  under  Roman  sway,  first  united  the 
nations  by  universal  lines  of  communica- 
tion. Many,  too,  of  the  Roman  camps  re- 
main, distinguished  by  their  regular  form, 
as  the  camps  of  discipline,  from  the  irregu- 
lar earthworks  of  the  Britons,  and  fancy 
may  people  them  with  the  forms  of  the 
legionaries  resting  after  their  long  march, 
or  in  the  case  of  the  standing  camps  {castra 
stativa),  drilling  and  messing  in  their  per- 
manent quarters.  At  Richborough  (Rutu- 
pise),  which  was  the  favourite  landing- 
place,  the  Roman  remains  are  very  impos- 
ing. But  the  English  Pompeii  is  Silchester 
(Calleva  Abrebatum),  three  miles  from  the 
Mortimer  station  of  the  railway  betw^een 
Reading  and  Basingstoke.  The  walls  of 
the  city  have  defied  time  and  the  destroyer ; 


ROMAN   ENGLAND.  II 

they  stand  almost  intact ;  but  the  city  hav- 
ing been  probably  stormed  and  burned  by 
the  barbarians,  nothing  is  left  of  the  houses, 
but  the  basements  alone  remain,  with  the 
hypocausts,  or  furnaces,  which  warmed  the 
rooms,  and  which  must  have  been  sorely 
needed  by  the  Italian  under  British  skies. 
The  lines  of  the  streets,  with  the  plan  of  the 
judgment-hall  (prsetorium),  are  plainly 
visible.  Outside  the  walls  is  the  amphi- 
theatre, in  which  no  doubt  the  gay  Koman 
officer,  condemned  to  these  remote  and  un- 
festive  quarters,  tried  to  indemnify  himself 
for  his  loss  of  the  Colosseum.  The  remains 
of  villas  with  their  tessellated  pavements  are 
found  in  different  parts  of  England,  prov- 
ing that  the  country  had  been  thoroughly 
subdued  and  that  the  Eoman  magnate 
could  enjoy  country  life  in  safety.  Inscrip- 
tions, coins,  weapons,  sepulchral  urns,  pot- 
tery, abound  in  the  museums.  In  the 
museum  at  York  is  a  touching  antiquity  — 
a  tress  of  a  Koman  lady's  hair.  Of  coins, 
140,000  have  been  found  at  Richborough. 
Great  quantities  are  sometimes  turned  up  by 
the  spade  or  plough.  The  Roman  retiring 
before  barbarian  invasion  perhaps  buried  his 
hoard,  thinking  to  come  back  for  it,  but 
came  back  no  more.     We  look  with  interest 


12  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

on  all  the  memorials  of  a  race,  which  in  so 
many  ways,  and  above  all  as  the  founder  of 
law,  has  stamped  its  image  on  humanity. 
But  Britain,  unlike  Italy,  France,  and  Spain, 
retained  nothing  of  the  Roman  Province 
except  its  ruins.  Her  character  and  insti- 
tutions, as  well  as  her  language,  were  those 
of  a  fresh  race. 

The  crypt  of  Ripon  Minster  was  pro- 
nounced by  that  great  antiquary,  the  late 
Mr.  Henry  Parker,  the  Church  of  the 
Saxon  Apostle  Wilfrid,  and  the  earliest 
monument  of  Christianity  in  those  parts. 
There  are  two  church  towers,  in  Saxon 
style,  at  Lincoln.  There  is  Saxon  work  at 
Westminster,  at  Dover,  and  elsewhere.  But 
the  Saxon  was  not  a  great  builder  even  of 
churches ;  happily  for  himself  he  was  not 
at  all  a  builder  of  castles.  He  thought  not  of 
magnificence  but  of  comfort.  Such  art  as  he 
cultivated  was  rather  that  of  the  goldsmith 
or  the  embroiderer.  Beautifully  chased 
drinking  cups  and  miracles  of  the  needle 
were  the  trophies  which  William  took  to 
Normandy  after  the  Conquest.  Of  Saxon 
tombs,  burial  urns,  and  weapons,  however, 
there  is  good  store.  In  the  Ashmolean 
Museum,  at  Oxford,  there  is  a  gem  whicb 


SAXON    ENGLAND.  1 3 

was  found  on  the  Isle  of  Athelney,  where 
Alfred  took  refuge ;  it  bears  the  name  of 
Alfred,  and  may  have  belonged  to  the  hero. 
But  the  most  important  monument  of  the 
Anglo-Saxons  is  really  the  White  Horse, 
cut  in  a  chalk  down  of  Berkshire,  about  the 
"  cleaning  "  of  which  we  have  been  told  by 
Thomas  Hughes.  This  is  the  trophy  of  a 
great  victory  gained  by  the  Saxon  over  the 
Dane,  by  Christianity  over  heathendom,  by 
the  moral  civilization  bound  up  with  Chris- 
tianity over  the  moral  barbarism  of  its  pagan 
enemies.  It  deserves  homage  more  than  any 
Arc  de  Triomphe. 

At  Pevensey  is  the  beach  on  which  the 
Norman  Conqueror  landed.  The  castle  on 
the  cliff  of  Hastings  marks  the  spot  where 
he  first  planted  his  standard.  From  that 
place  it  is  easy  to  trace  his  line  of  march 
till  he  saw  Harold  with  the  English  army 
facing  him  on  the  fatal  hill  of  Senlac.  The 
battle-field  is  as  well  marked  as  that  of 
Waterloo,  and  fancy  can  recall  the  charges 
of  the  Norman  cavalry  up  the  hillside  against 
the  solid  formation  and  the  shield  wall  of 
the  Saxon  precursors  of  our  British  infantry. 
The  ruins  of  Battle  Abbey,  the  religious 
trophy  of  the  Conqueror,  are  still  seen,  and 


14  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

the  site  of  the  high  altar  exactly  marks  the 
spot  where  the  fatal  arrow  entering  Harold's 
brain  slew  not  only  a  king,  but  a  kingdom, 
and  marred  the  destiny  of  a  race.  We  are 
on  the  scene  of  one  of  the  greatest  catas- 
trophes of  history.  Had  that  arrow  missed 
its  mark,  Anglo-Saxon  institutions  would 
have  developed  themselves  in  their  integ- 
rity, the  Anglo-Saxon  tongue  would  have 
perfected  itself  in  its  purity,  Anglo-Norman 
aristocracy  would  never  have  been,  or  have 
left  its  evil  traces  on  society,  the  fatal  con- 
nection of  England  and  France,  and  the 
numerous  French  wars  of  the  Plantagenets 
would  have  been  blotted  out  of  the  book  of 
fate. 

England  now  becomes  for  four  centuries 
and  a  half  a  member  of  Catholic  and  feu- 
dal Europe,  a  partaker  in  Crusades  and  a 
tilting-ground  of  chivalry.  The  informing 
spirit  of  this  period  and  the  basis  of  its 
peculiar  morality  is  the  Catholic  religion, 
having  its  centre  in  the  Papacy,  which  tri- 
umphed over  national  independence  with 
the  Norman,  by  whom  its  sacred  banner 
was  borne  at  Hastings.  Of  mediseval  piety 
we  have  glorious  monuments  in  the  cathe- 
drals and  the  great  churches.  Nothing  so 
wonderful  or  beautiful  has  ever  been  built 


ENGLAND  IN  THE  MIDDLE  AGES.       1 5 

by  man  as  these  fanes  of  mediaeval  religion 
which  still,  surviving  the  faith  and  the  civil- 
ization which  reared  them,  rise  above  the 
din  and  smoke  of  modern  life  into  purity 
and  stillness.  In  religious  impressiveness 
they  far  excel  all  the  works  of  heathen  art 
and  all  the  classical  temples  of  the  Renais- 
sance, Even  in  point  of  architectural  skill 
they  stand  unrivalled,  though  they  are  the 
creations  of  an  age  before  mechanical  sci- 
ence. Their  groined  roofs  appear  still  to 
baffle  imitation.  But  we  do  not  fully  com- 
prehend the  marvel,  unless  we  imagine  the 
cathedrals  rising,  as  they  did,  out  of  towns 
which  were  then  little  better  than  collec- 
tions of  hovels,  with  but  small  accumula- 
tion of  wealth,  and  without  what  we  now 
deem  the  appliances  of  civilized  life.  Never 
did  man's  spiritual  aspirations  soar  so  high 
above  the  realities  of  his  worldly  lot  as 
when  he  built  the  cathedrals.  But  we 
must  not  look  at  the  cathedrals  or  at  the 
churches  as  a  group  without  distinguishing 
the  periods  to  which  they  severally  belong 
and  the  memories  of  which  they  recall. 
There  are  four  periods,  marked  by  the 
successive  phases  of  the  Gothic  style :  the 
Norman,  which  should  rather  be  called 
Romanesque  than  Gothic,  with  its  round 


l6  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

arch ;  the  Early  English,  with  its  pointed 
arch  and  windows  without  mullions  ;  the 
Decorated,  with  its  mullions  and  increase 
of  ornament ;  the  Perpendicular,  the  lines 
of  which  correspond  to  its  name,  while  the 
ornament,  by  its  tendency  to  excess  and 
weakness,  denotes  a  period  of  decay.  VTe 
see  these  styles  often  blended  together  in 
successive  portions  of  the  same  cathedral. 
The  best  and  most  glorious  age  of  Catholi- 
cism, the  age  in  which  the  Catholic  faith 
was  fresh,  in  which  the  morality  founded 
on  it  and  the  heroism  mspired  by  it  were 
at  their  highest,  the  age  in  which  it  pro- 
duced such  characters  as  Edward  I.  and 
St.  Louis,  is  hiarked  by  the  Early  English 
style  and  the  transition  from  this  to  the 
Decorated.  There  is  a  satisfaction  in  con- 
necting the  beauty  of  a  religious  building 
with  the  character  and  aspirations  of  the 
builders.  It  is  not  so  pleasant  to  think,  as 
we  look  at  the  glories  of  Milan,  that  they 
are  the  work  of  the  cruel,  unprincipled,  and 
perfidious  Visconti.  Salisbury-,  completed 
in  the  Early  English  style,  or  in  that  of  the 
transition,  is  the  most  perfect  monument 
of  mediaeval  Christianity  in  England  ;  and, 
amidst  all  the  doubts  and  perplexities  of 
our  own  time,  it  is  impossible  not  to  look 


CHURCH    ARCHITECTURE.  1/ 

back  with  envy  on  men  who,  free  from  all 
misgivings  as  to  the  absolnte  truth  of  their 
creed,  spent  their  lives  in  rearing  tliis  work 
of  beauty  or  watching  it  rise,  and  with  the 
highest  joys  of  art,  combined  the  still 
higher  joy  of  feeling  that  art  would  min- 
ister to  the  salvation  of  souls.  The  great 
works  of  the  Perpendicular  period  remmd 
us  rather  of  the  class  of  worldly,  ambitious, 
and,  if  not  sceptical,  somewhat  careless 
Churchmen  to  which  Fox  and  Wolsey  be- 
longed, and  which  in  its  sumptuous  crea- 
tions was  moved  more  by  love  of  art  and 
magnificence  than  by  spiritual  aspirations. 
To  Westminster  Abbey  we  shall  come  when 
we  come  to  Westminster  Hall.  Of  all  the 
other  cathedrals  Canterbury  is  the  most 
historical,  as  well  as  the  metropolitan ;  and 
it  has  had  the  good  fortune  of  being  de- 
scribed by  Stanley,  w^ho  was  one  of  its 
canons  and  in  whom  historical  topography 
was  a  passion.  In  Canterbury  is  that 
strange  memorial  of  the  priestly  ambition 
of  the  Middle  Ages  and  of  the  great  con- 
flict between  Church  and  State,  the  shrine 
of  Thomas  a  Becket.  In  Canterbury  is  the 
tomb  of  the  Black  Prince,  and  over  it  hangs 
the  armour  that  speaks  of  Crecy  and  Poic- 
tiers.     Winchester  also  is  full  of  history, 

B 


1 8  A    TRIP    TO    E^'GLAXD. 

and  though  it  is  wanting  in  sublimity  of 
height,  as  the  English  cathedrals  are  gen- 
erally, compared  with  their  more  soaring 
sisters  in  France,  there  is  something  about 
it  peculiarly  impressive.  In  height  and 
grandeur  the  palm  is  borne  off  by  York  ; 
in  beauty  and  poetry  by  Lincoln.  Norman 
Durham,  '-half  church  of  God,  half  castle 
'gainst  the  Scot,"  is  profoundly  imposing 
from  its  massiveness,  which  seems  endur- 
ing as  the  foundations  of  the  earth,  as  well 
as  from  its  commanding  situation.  Ely  is 
also  a  glorious  pile,  while  its  site  has  his- 
torical interest  as  the  scene  of  the  last  stand 
made  by  the  Saxon  against  the  Norman 
Conqueror.  Wells  is  lovely  in  itself,  and 
it  stands  on  a  broad  expanse  of  lawn  sur- 
rounded by  old  ecclesiastical  buildings 
which  escaped  the  destroyer,  and  present 
a  picture  of  old  cathedral  life.  Wells  and 
Salisbury  are  perhaps  the  two  best  speci- 
mens of  the  cathedral  close,  that  haven  of 
religious  calm  amidst  this  bustling  world, 
in  which  a  man  tired  of  business  and  con- 
tentious life  might  delight,  especially  if  he 
has  a  taste  for  books,  to  find  tranquillity, 
with  quiet  companionship,  in  his  old  age. 
Take  your  stand  on  the  Close  of  Salisbury 
or  Wells  on  a  summer  afternoon  when  the 


THE    CATHEDRALS.  1 9 

congregation  is  filing  leisurely  out  from  the 
service  and  the  sounds  are  still  heard  from 
the  cathedral,  and  you  will  experience  a 
sensation  not  to  be  experienced  in  the  New 
World. 

In  thinking  of  the  cathedrals  we  must 
not  forget  the  old  parish  churches,  legacies 
most  of  them  of  the  Catholic  ^Middle  Ages, 
often  very  fine,  and  always  speaking  pleas- 
antly to  the  heart,  especially  when  they  fill 
the  air  with  the  music  of  their  Sabbath 
chimes  or  of  their  wedding  bells.  But 
among  these,  since  the  revival  of  Anglican- 
ism, the  hand  of  the  restorer,  or  rather  of 
the  rebuilder,  has  been  so  busy  that  in  some 
districts  it  is  easier  to  find  churches  in  an 
ancient  style  than  an  ancient  church.  It 
was  no  doubt  right,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  reUgious  feeling  as  well  as  from  that 
of  taste,  to  remove  the  high-backed  pews, 
the  galleries  which  ruined  the  form  of  the 
church,  the  hideous  monuments  which 
defaced  the  chancel ;  but  these  things, 
which  an  Englishman  who  has  passed  sixty 
remembers  so  well,  had  associations  of 
which  the  work  of  Gilbert  Scott  or  Butter- 
field,  however  correct  as  a  reproduction  of 
mediceval  Gothic,  is  devoid.  Perhaps  no 
better    representation    of    the    old    parish 


20  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

church  is  to  be  found  than  the  church  of 
Iffley,  which  is  close  to  Oxford,  and  is  ex- 
ceedingly interesting  as  a  specimen  of  the 
Norman  style.  Iffley  churchyard,  in  which 
stands  a  yew  tree  that  may  have  seen  the 
Norman  times,  is  also  a  good  specimen  of 
the  peace  of  death  which  an  old  English 
churchyard  presents,  perhaps  in  a  pleas- 
anter,  at  all  events  in  a  more  religious, 
guise  than  these  cemeteries  of  ours,  with 
their  posthumous  rivalries  of  vanity  in 
columns,  pyramids,  and  obelisks,  and  their 
somewhat  ghastly  attempts  to  make  the 
grave  look  pretty.  In  Iffley  churchyard,  as 
well  as  in  any  other,  you  may  find  a  local 
habitation  for  the  thoughts  of  Gray's  Elegy. 
The  cathedral  and  the  parish  church 
belong  to  the  present  as  well  as  to  the  past. 
Indeed,  they  have  been  recently  exerting 
a  peculiar  influence  over  the  present,  for 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  spell  of  their 
beauty  and  their  adaptation,  as  places  of 
Catholic  devotion,  to  the  Eitualistic  rather 
than  to  the  frotestant  form  of  worship 
have  had  a  great  effect  in  producing  the 
Neo-Catholic  reaction  of  the  last  half  cen- 
tury. Creations  of  the  religious  genius  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  they  have  been  potent 
missionaries  of  the  mediaeval  faith.     But 


PARISH    CHURCHES.  21 

there  is  a  part  of  Mediaeval  Catliolicism 
wliich  belongs  entirely  to  the  past,  and  the 
monuments  of  which  present  themselves 
only  in  the  form  of  ruins.  Asceticism  and 
Monasticism  were  discarded  by  the  Refor- 
mation. Nothing  but  the  \NTecks  remain 
of  the  vast  and  beautiful  abodes  in  which 
they  dwelt.  Of  the  monastic  ruins  the  most 
perfect  and  interesting  is  Foimtains  Abbey, 
near  Ripon,  and  on  the  estate  of  Lord 
Ripon,  who,  as  a  convert  himself  to  Roman 
Catholicism,  has  exemplified  the  lingering 
influence  of  what  Macaulay  calls  "that 
august  and  fascinating  superstition."  In 
romantic  loveliness  of  situation  the  first 
place  is  claimed  by  Tintern  on  the  Wye, 
the  second  by  Rievaux  or  Bolton,  both  of 
which  are  in  Yorkshire,  a  great  land  of 
monastic  remains.  The  name  of  Tintern  is 
dear  and  familiar  to  many  who  have  never 
seen  the  ruin,  but  who  well  know  the  lines 
which  enslirine  the  poetic  philosophy  of 
Wordsworth.  The  ruins  of  Glastonbury  are 
also  most  interesting,  not  only  on  account 
of  the  grandeur'  which  the  fragments  of  the 
church  bespeak,  and  the  sumptuous  hospi- 
tality represented  by  the  abbot's  kitchen, 
but  because,  as  the  great  master  of  all 
this  lore,  Professor  Freeman,  savs :   "The 


22  A    TRIP    TO    EXGLAXD. 

church  of  Glastonbury,  founded  by  the 
Briton,  honoured  and  enriched  by  the 
Englishman,  is  the  one  great  religious 
foundation  which  lived  through  the  storm 
of  English  Conquest,  and  in  which  Briton 
and  Englishmen  have  an  equal  share."' 
Here  we  are  in  the  realm  of  Arthur,  and 
may  read  with  enhanced  enjoyment  the 
Idyls  of  the  King.  It  is  impossible  not 
to  be  touched  by  these  ruins,  or  to  forbear 
the  protest  of  the  heart  against  the  ruthless 
destroyers  of  such  loveliness.  But  there  is 
nothing  except  the  architectural  beauty  to 
regret.  The  monasteries  had  done  their 
appointed  work  during  the  iron  times  of  feu- 
dalism and  private  war  as  places  of  refuge 
for  the  gentler  spirits,  as  homes  of  such 
culture  as  there  was,  and  centres  of  civili- 
zation. But  the  various  orders  to  which 
they  belonged,  Benedictine,  Cistercian, 
Franciscan,  or  Dominican,  denote  succes- 
sive attempts  to  rise  to  an  angelic  life,  each 
soon  followed  by  the  collapse  of  the  wings 
of  asceticism  and  contemplation  on  w-hich 
the  mortal  strove  to  soar  above  his  mortal 
state.  At  the  time  of  the  Keformation  the 
spiritual  character  even  of  the  least  corrupt 
of  the  monastic  houses  had  probably  waxed 
verv  faint,   while  in  some,    it  cannot  be 


THE    MONASTERIES.  23 

doubted,  not  only  idleness  and  self-indul- 
gence but  the  grossest  vice  had  made  their 
abode.  Even  the  work  of  copying  books 
and  missal-painting,  by  which  they  had 
done  good  service  to  literature  and  minor 
art,  was  being  superseded  by  printing.  As 
a  class,  these  houses  had  become  the 
strongholds  of  reactionary  superstition,  the 
ramparts  of  intolerance,  and  the  great 
obstacles  to  the  progress  of  humanity. 
They  still  offered  hospitality  to  the  way- 
farer. They  still  fed  the  poor  at  their 
gates,  and  as  we  look  upon  the  ruined 
portal  arch  we  may  see  the  weary  traveller 
dismount  and  the  beadsmen  gather  beside 
it.  Their  hospitality  and  their  charity  pre- 
served their  popularity  in  districts  where, 
as  in  the  north,  inns  were  few,  and  in  a  time 
when  public  charity  did  not  exist ;  and  the 
great  northern  insurrection,  called  the  Pil- 
grimage of  Grace,  in  which  the  abbots  of 
Yorkshire  monasteries  took  part,  was  prob- 
ably as  much  a  social  movement  against 
the  destruction  of  the  monasteries  as  a 
religious  movement  against  doctrinal  inno- 
vation. The  nunneries  seem,  as  might  have 
been  expected,  to  have  preserved  their 
purity  and  usefulness  better  than  the  mon- 
astic houses  of  a  sex  of  which  the  passions 


24  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

were  stronger  and  less  easily  tamed  by 
monastic  rule.  Some  of  them  were  still 
doing  good  service  in  the  education  of 
women.  We  may  think  of  this  as  we  stand 
among  the  ruins  of  Godstow  Nunnery,  near 
Oxford,  which  possess  a  further  interest  as 
having  witnessed  the  last  days  of  Henry  the 
Second's  fair  Rosamond,  the  legend  of  the 
labyrinth  notwithstanding.  With  the  ruins 
of  ])ominican  and  Franciscan  jMonasteries 
is  connected  the  memory  of  the  vast  devel- 
opment at  once  of  Asceticism,  of  Papal 
power,  and  of  crusading  orthodoxy,  in 
the  thirteenth  century.  The  Dominican 
churches  are  in  their  form  specially  adapted 
for  preaching,  which  was  one  of  the  great 
functions  of  the  order,  the  other  being, 
unhappily,  the  administration  of  the  Inqui- 
sition. There  is  a  specimen,  now  restored 
and  turned  into  a  modern  church,  at  Read- 
ing. Attached  to  the  Cathedral  of  Peter- 
borough is  a  Benedictine  cloister,  which 
recalls  to  us  very  vividly  the  daily  life  of  a 
monk,  while  the  cathedral  itself  stands  first 
perhaps  among  the  cathedrals  of  the  second 
class.  At  Knaresborough,  in  Yorkshire,  in 
a  romantic  dell,  is  the  monument  of  another 
and  still  more  intense  kind  of  asceticism  in 
the  form  of  a  hermitage,  which  deserves  a 


THE    MONASTERIES.  25 

visit.  The  spot  has  the  additional  attraction 
of  being  the  scene  of  tlie  story  of  Eugene 
Aram.  Aram's  erudite  defence  turned 
upon  the  point  that  a  hermit,  after  his 
lonely  life  of  mortification,  was  buried 
alone  in  his  cell,  so  that  the  body  alleged 
to  be  that  of  the  murdered  Clarke  might  in 
reality  be  that  of  the  hermit.  There  is 
another  hermitage  at  Warkworth,  near  the 
ruins  of  the  gi-eat  castle.  Those  cells  claim 
at  least  the  tribute  due  to  an  experiment  in 
perfection,  however  misdirected  and  abor- 
tive. 

Among  the  religious  memorials  of  the 
iNIiddle  Ages  are  also  to  be  numbered  the 
crosses  to  which  the  eye  of  mediaeval  piety 
was  turned  in  the  churchyard  or  the  market- 
place and  by  the  wayside.  Hardly  any  of 
them  escaped  ruthless  mutilation  when  the 
tempest  of  popular  wrath  burst  forth  against 
an  ancient  faith  which  had  degenerated 
into  a  hollow  superstition.  But  a  special 
homage  is  due  to  the  "Eleanor's  Crosses," 
of  which  the  two  best  preserved  will  be 
found  at  Waltham  and  Northampton,  and 
which  are  monuments  raised  to  conjugal 
love,  in  the  best  period  of  Catholicism,  by 
the  noblest  of  kings  and  men. 

Feudalism,  like  Monasticism,  is  a  thing 


26  A    TRIP   TO    EXGLAND. 

of  the  past,  though  it  has  left  its  traces  on 
law  and  social  organization.  Its  abodes, 
like  those  of  ^Nlonasticism,  are  ruins.  One 
here  and  there,  like  a  knight  exchanging 
his  armour  for  the  weeds  of  peace  when 
war  was  over,  has  been  softened  and  de- 
veloped into  a  palace  or  a  mansion,  as  in 
the  case  of  AVarwick,  the  abode  of  the 
"Last  of  the  Barons,-'  of  Alnwick,  the 
fortress  of  the  Percies,  and  that  of  the  great 
keep  of  "Windsor  itself.  In  every  part  of 
the  land,  on  heights  and  commanding  points, 
shattered  ruins  mark  the  seat  from  which 
feudal  lordship  once  looked  down  in  its 
might  and  pride  upon  a  land  of  serfs.  Even 
the  loftiness  of  the  situation  and  the  more 
bracing  air  must  have  helped  to  nourish  in 
the  Xorman  chief  the  sense  of  superiority 
to  the  peasants  or  burghers  whose  habita- 
tions cowered  below.  In  their  day  these 
fortresses,  the  more  important  of  them  at 
least,  were  creations  of  military  architecture, 
equal  perhaps  in  its  way  to  the  ecclesiasti- 
cal architecture  which  created  the  cathe- 
drals. Owing  his  power,  his  security,  his 
importance  to  the  strength  of  his  castle,  and 
every  day  surveying  it,  the  lord  would  be 
always  occupying  himself  in  perfecting  its 
defences.      To  understand   what  a   castle 


FEUDALISM   AND    ITS    CASTLES.        IJ 

was,  and  how  it  was  attacked  and  defended, 
it  is  necessary  to  read  some  work  on  mili- 
tary architecture,  like  that  of  Viollet  Le 
Due,  and  thus  to  enable  ourselves  to  restore 
in  fancy  not  only  the  stone  structure  of 
which  the  fragments  are  before  us,  but  the 
wooden  platforms  upon  which  the  defenders 
fought.  "  Destroyed  by  Cromwell,"  is  the 
usual  epitaph  of  an  English  castle.  But 
generally  speaking,  gunpowder  and  social 
progress  were  the  combined  powers  before 
wiiich  the  massy  walls  of  the  feudal  Jericho 
fell  down.  Sometimes  the  castle  ruins 
stand  mute  records  of  the  past  in  the  midst 
of  some  thriving  city,  and  the  castle  hill, 
converted  into  a  pleasure  ground,  forms  the 
evening  lounge  of  tlie  burghers  whose  fore- 
fathers its  frowning  battlements  overawed. 
Evil  memories  haunt  tliose  dungeons,  now 
laid  open  to  the  light  of  day,  in  wdiich  the 
captives  of  feudalism  once  pined.  Berkeley 
rang  with  the  shrieks  of  an  agonizing  king. 
Pomfret,  too,  saw  a  dethroned  monarch 
meet  the  usual  fate  of  the  dethroned,  and 
afterwards  saw  the  hapless  enemies  of 
Richard  III.  pass  to  the  tragic  death  which 
in  the  time  of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  had 
become  almost  the  common  lot  of  nobility 
and  ambition.      With   the  very   name    of 


28  A    TRIP   TO   ENGLAND. 

castle  is  connected  the  dreadful  memory  of 
the  anarchy  in  the  time  of  King  Stephen, 
when  castles  were  multiplied,  and  each  of 
them  became  the  den  and  torture-house  of 
some  P"ront-de-Bceuf,  with  his  band  of  ma- 
rauding mercenaries,  so  that  the  cry  of  the 
people  was  that  Christ  and  the  saints  slept. 
This  is  the  dark  side  of  the  history  which 
the  ruins  of  castles  recall.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  should  be  remembered  that  the 
lord  of  the  feudal  castle  did,  after  his  fash- 
ion, the  necessary  service  of  an  iron  time. 
If  he  oppressed  the  dwellers  beneath  his 
ramparts,  he  also  protected  them  against 
other  oppressors.  In  the  days  before 
regular  and  centralized  administration,  local 
lordship  was  in  fact,  in  the  rural  districts 
at  least,  about  the  only  possible  instrument 
of  social  and  political  organization.  By  it 
alone  could  the  rough  justice  of  the  times 
be  meted  out,  or  the  forces  of  the  commu- 
nity called  forth  for  national  or  local 
defence.  The  life  of  a  lord  then  was  not 
one  of  sybaritism,  but  of  very  hard  work. 
If  he  was  good,  as  a  certain  proportion  of  the 
lords  no  doubt  were,  the  tie  between  him  and 
his  vassals,  though  repugnant  to  the  ideas 
of  modern  democracy,  was  not  necessarily 
hateful  or  degrading ;  it  has  supplied  con- 


FEUDAL    CASTLES.  29 

genial  food  for  poetry  and  romance.  Under 
a  weak  king  like  Stephen  the  castles  were 
strongholds  of  anarchy,  and  Stephen's 
strong  successor,  when  he  demolished  a 
great  number  of  them,  packed  off  the  mer- 
cenaries who  had  manned  them,  and  strictly 
enforced  the  law  against  unlicensed  fortifi- 
cation, must  have  been  blessed  by  all  his 
people.  But  against  a  king  who  was  too 
strong  and  aimed  at  absolute  power  the 
baronage  was  the  rude  champion  and 
trustee  of  liberty.  Had  the  royal  mercena- 
ries been  able  to  sweep  the  kingdom  with- 
out resistance,  not  law  and  order  but  the 
untempered  sway  of  a  despot's  will  would 
have  been  the  result.  Xor  ought  it  to  be 
forgotten  that  rude  and  coarse  as  life  in 
these  castles  was,  in  them  took  place  a  very 
happy  change  in  the  relations  between  the 
sexes  and  the  character  of  domestic  life. 
In  the  cities  of  antiquity  the  men  lived 
together  in  public,  while  the  women  were 
shut  up  at  home  almost  as  in  a  harem. 
But  in  the  castle  the  sexes  lived  constantly 
together,  and  the  lord  must  have  learned  to 
find  his  daily  happiness  in  the  company  of 
his  lady.  Thither,  too,  came  the  trouba- 
dour with  his  lays  and  the  trouvere  with  his 
tales,  thrice  welcome  when  there  was  no 


30  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

newspaper,  no  salon,  no  theatre,  and  re- 
fined the  minds  of  the  inmates  of  the  castle 
while  they  beguiled  the  weary  hour. 

In  the  architecture  of  the  castles,  as  in 
that  of  the  cathedrals,  there  are  successive 
phases  which  mark  the  changing  times. 
A  stem  Norman  keep,  such  as  that  of  Roch- 
ester, recalls  the  days  in  which  the  con- 
quered Saxon  looked  up  with  fear  and 
hatred  to  the  hold  of  the  Conqueror.  Gradu- 
ally, as  times  grew  milder,  the  Xorman 
keep  was  softened  through  a  series  of  modi- 
fications into  the  fortified  mansion,  such  as 
Bodiam,  in  Sussex,  built  by  one  of  the  com- 
panions-in-arms  of  Edward  III.,  out  of  his 
winnings  in  the  French  wars.  At  last  we 
come  to  a  mansion  like  Hurstmonceaux, 
also  in  Sussex,  which  betokens  the  final 
transition  into  the  manor  house.  Hurst- 
monceaux is  worth  visiting  were  it  only  as 
a  specimen  of  brickwork  which  puts  our  age 
to  shame.  Only  a  fragment  of  it,  however, 
remains.  The  rest  was  pulled  down  in  a  fit 
of  spleen,  it  is  said,  by  a  proprietor  on 
whose  grave  rests  the  antiquary's  malison. 
The  castellated  mansion  of  Hever,  in  Kent, 
has  been  more  fortunate.  The  great  castles 
of  the  north,  such  as  Warkworth,  Xawortli. 
Alnwick,  and  Ford,  recall  the  memories  uf 


OLD    CITY   WALLS.  3 1 

the  wild  Border  wars  of  Hotspur  and  of 
Chevy  Chase.  The  castles  of  Wales,  not- 
ably Carnarvon,  tell  of  the  strategy  and 
policy  of  JEdward,  the  greatest  not  only  of 
the  Plantagenets,  but  of  all  mediaeval 
kings. 

The  cities  of  the  Old  World,  with  their 
narrow  and  crooked  streets,  speak  of  the 
time  in  which  the  burghers  were  huddled 
together  within  the  walls  which  guarded 
their  little  realms  of  industry  from  feudal 
violence,  while  the  cities  of  the  Xew  World, 
spreading  out  freely  and  in  straight  lines, 
speak  of  the  security  of  a  happier  era.  Of 
the  ancient  walls,  about  the  best  specimen 
is  to  be  seen  at  Chester,  fortified  m  former 
days  against  the  wild  Welsh.  Of  the  walls 
of  York  also  there  are  fine  remains,  with 
the  ancient  gateways  or  bars  through  which 
the  capital  of  the  north  saw  many  a  mail- 
clad  column  march,  and  many  a  procession 
of  state  defile.  The  visitor  to  Oxford  should 
not  fail  to  see  the  remnant  of  the  city  wall 
within  which  lie  New  College  and  its  gar- 
dens, and  which  was  kept  in  repair  by  vir- 
tue of  a  covenant  between  the  founder  of 
the  College  and  the  city.  Conway,  on  the 
north  coast  of  Wales,  presents  or  not  long 
ago  presented,  though  on  a  small  scale,  the 


32  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

aspect  of  a  walled  town  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
with  its  castle  almost  in  the  original  state, 
though  the  fast  train  from  London  to  Holy- 
head runs  where  the  warder  of  the  lonely 
garrison  once  looked  over  the  Welsh  hills 
and  but  rarely,  like  the  warder  of  Norham 
in  Marmion,  saw  approach  "a  plump  of 
spears." 

Of  England's  part  —  no  mean  part  —  in 
the  Crusades  and  of  her  chivalry  the  chief 
monument  is  the  Temple  Church,  in  Lon- 
don, with  the  tombs  of  the  Templars  which 
it  contains.  Few  things  in  the  way  of 
monumental  sculpture  are  more  impressive 
than  these  simple  and  soldier-like  effigies  of 
the  warriors  of  the  Cross  when  we  think  of 
the  religious  romance  of  lives  spent  in  com- 
bat with  the  Paynim  on  the  fields  of  Pales- 
tine. The  Order  of  the  Templars  fell  partly 
no  doubt  through  its  own  vices  and  pride, 
the  consequences  of  the  wealth  which  Chris- 
tian enthusiasm  had  lavished  on  it,  and  out 
of  which  it  built  the  proud  fortress-mansion 
to  which  the  Church  belonged.  But  it  had 
rendered  illustrious  service  to  Christendom 
and  to  civilization  by  stemming  the  onrush- 
ing  tide  of  Mahometan  conquest,  and  we 
are  glad  to  think  that  at  least  its  dissolu- 
tion was  not  attended  in  England  by  the 


CHIVALRY.  ^^ 

vile  and  dastardly  cruelties  which  were  in- 
flicted on  Jacques  de  Molay  and  his  brethren 
by  a  tyrant  in  France.  In  the  home  of  the 
redoutable  and  ambitious  brotherhood  a 
peaceful  society  of  lawyers  now  dwells,  and 
the  preacher  of  the  society  bears  the  title  of 
"The  Master  of  the  Temple."  When  we 
speak  of  chivalry  we  mean  the  genuine 
chivalry  of  Sir  Galahad  and  his  fellows, 
who,  as  soldiers  of  God  and  champions  of 
Christendom,  went  in  quest  of  "  the  Holy 
Grail,"  not  of  that  fantastic  aftergrowth 
which  appeared  wiien  the  crusades  were 
over,  and  which  swore  on  the  swans,  wor- 
shipped women  as  goddesses,  while  it  by  no 
means  treated  them  as  Dianas,  performed 
crazy  vows  in  their  honour,  tilted  in  sense- 
less tournaments,  made  reckless  wars  out 
of  a  mere  spirit  of  adventure,  cultivated  a 
narrow  class  sense  of  honour,  trampled  on 
the  peasant,  and  at  last  sat  for  the  portrait 
of  Don  Quixote.  The  products  and  me- 
morials of  this  bastard  chivalry  are  the 
orders,  titles,  and  ceremonies  of  Knight- 
hood, which  have  been  transmuted  in 
course  of  time  into  a  curious  sort  of  Legion 
of  Honour,  much,  as  we  know,  to  the  satis- 
faction of  Colonial  ambition. 
Among  the  relics  of  the  feudal  era  may 

0 


34  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

be  numbered  the  forests  once  dedicated  to 
the  mdulgence  of  that  passion  for  the  chase 
which  devoured  the  restless  Norman  in  the 
intervals  of  war.  and  long  the  hateful  scenes 
of  Norman  tyranny,  now  pleasant  retreats 
of  sylvan  beauty  and  peace  in  a  thronged 
and  busy  country.  The  most  considerable 
of  them  is  the  New  Forest,  to  create  which 
the  Conqueror  laid  waste  a  wide  district, 
sweeping  away  hamlet,  grange,  and  church, 
and  which,  as  the  judgment  of  Heaven  on 
his  tyranny,  saw  the  deaths  of  two  of  his 
sons.  A  stone  marks  the  spot  where  a 
party  of  charcoal  burners  found  the  body 
of  the  Red  King,  slain  by  an  unknown 
hand  and  carried  in  their  carts,  like  the 
carcase  of  a  wild  boar,  as  a  chronicle  says, 
to  unhonoured  burial  at  "NVhichester. 

Of  the  purely  domestic  architecture  of 
the  Middle  Ages  it  was  not  likely  that  very 
much  either  in  town  or  country  would  re- 
main. Antiquity  and  picturesqueness  give 
way  to  solidity  and  convenience.  But  in  the 
rows  of  Chester,  in  Coventry,  in  Shrews- 
bury, in  Bristol,  in  the  remains  now  rapidly 
diminishing  of  the  ancient  City  of  London, 
in  the  out-of-the-way  streets  of  almost 
every  old  town,  will  be  foimd  some  of 
those  curious  timbered  houses  which  pre- 


' 


ELIZABETHAN   MANOR    HOUSES.        35 

serve  the  impress  of  the  past.  At  Bury 
and  Lincoln,  houses  even  of  the  Norman 
period  are  found.  Coventry  retains  per- 
haps the  sanitary  as  wePl  as  the  architec- 
tural image  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  excuses 
the  cynical  judge  who  when  a  witness  was 
provokingly  slow  of  utterance  upbraided 
him  with  keeping  the  court  all  that  time  at 
Coventry.  A  few  civic  halls,  as  at  Oakham 
in  Rutlandshire,  remain.  Of  the  ancient 
county  mansions,  the  queen  is  Haddon  Hall, 
in  Derbyshire,  most  beautiful,  now  that  it 
is  touched  by  time,  and  recalling  by  its 
union  of  amplitude,  stateliness,  and  rude- 
ness, as  we  pass  through  its  rooms,  once 
thronged  with  guests  and  serving-men,  the 
rough  magnificence  and  roystering  hospi- 
talities of  the  old  baronial  life.  But  many 
an  ancient  hall  has  fallen  from  its  high 
estate,  ,and  now  presents  itself  in  a  dilapi- 
dated condition  under  the  humble  guise  of 
a  farm  house. 

Out  of  the  wTeck  of  the  mediaeval  nobility 
in  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  arose  the  power- 
ful monarchy  of  the  Tudors.  Of  this  period 
the  monuments  are  the  Elizabethan  manor 
houses,  the  palaces  of  that  new  nobihty  of 
the  council  chamber  and  the  robe  which 


36  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

supplanted  the  mail-clad  baronage,  and 
which  had  been  enriched  by  the  confisca- 
tion of  Church  lands.  Nothing  in  the  way 
of  domestic  arcliitecture  is  more  beautiful 
or  stately  than  those  great  houses.  They 
are  at  a  disadvantage,  in  comparison  with 
the  churches  and  abbeys  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  only  in  having  been  built  for  the 
purposes  of  private  state  and  luxury,  not 
for  the  satisfaction  of  higher  aspirations. 
Pre-eminent  in  historical  interest,  as  well 
as  in  magnificence,  are  Burleigh  and  Hat- 
field, the  palaces  of  the  two  branches  of 
the  great  Elizabethan  house  of  Cecil,  and 
memorials  of  the  high  services  rendered  to 
the  State  in  time  of  peril,  albeit  not  untainted 
with  Machiavellian  statecraft.  Audley  p]nd, 
near  Cambridge,  displays  the  ill-gotten 
wealth,  and  preserves  the  evil  memory,  of 
one  of  the  worst  mmisters  of  the  tyranny 
of  Henry  A^III.  Knowle,  in  Kent,  is  to  be 
seen  if  possible.  It  is  a  storehouse  of 
ancient  memories,  and  a  wonderful  presen- 
tation of  the  most  magnificent  life  of  the 
Tudor  times.  Penshurst  derives  a  charm 
from  its  association  with  Sir  Philip  Sidney. 
Bramshill,  not  very  far  from  Basingstoke, 
in  the  north  of  Hampshire,  has  the  advan- 
tage of  presenthig  its  stately  front  on  a 


THE    AGE    OF    THE    STUARTS.  37 

rising  ground,  whereas  most  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan mansions  stand  on  flats,  and  of 
being  surrounded  by  a  wild  park  with  fine 
Scotch  firs.  It  was  in  that  park  that  Arch- 
bishop Abbott  accidentally  shot  a  keeper, 
and  thereby  incurred  an  ecclesiastical  dis- 
qualification, which  helped  to  clear  Laud's 
path  to  an  ill-starred  supremacy  in  the 
Church,  But  in  almost  any  part  of  the 
country  in  which  you  may  chance  to  be, 
you  will  find  an  Elizabethan  manor  house. 
The  amplitude,  solidity,  and  comfort  of 
these  mansions  being  not  less  remarkable 
than  their  beauty,  no  one  has  thought  of 
improving  them  out  of  existence.  Ken- 
il worth,  however,  the  palace  in  which 
Leicester's  dark  ambition  entertained  the 
woman  whose  throne  he  hoped  to  share,  is 
now  a  huge  ruin ;  while,  in  place  of  the 
royal  palace  of  Greenwich,  where  the 
statesmen  and  the  heroic  adventurers  of 
that  age  formed  a  peerless  circle  round 
their  queen,  now,  not  inappropriately, 
stands  Greenwich  Hospital. 

The  age  of  the  Stuarts  was  one  rather  of 
conflict  and  destruction  than  of  creation  of 
any  kind.  Castles  shattered  by  Cromwell's 
artillery,  church  carvings  and  monuments 
defaced  by  Puritan  iconoclasm,  traces  of 


38  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

field  works  and  trenches,  military  relics  of 
Edgehill,  Marston.  and  Xaseby,  are  the 
characteristic  monuments  of  a  period  of 
revolution  and  civil  war.  Near  Basingstoke, 
and  not  far  from  Silchester  and  Bramshill, 
may  be  seen  the  vast  substructions  of  Basing 
House,  the  fortified  palace  of  the  ^larquis 
of  Winchester,  which,  as  the  readers  of 
Carlyle  know,  after  long  holding  out  against 
the  forces  of  the  Parliament,  was  stormed 
and  razed  by  Cromwell  himself.  It  is  a 
relic  eminently  symbolical  of  the  era  in 
which  the  marquises  went  down  before  the 
onset  of  the  Cromwells.  This  series  of 
relics  is  closed  by  the  wall  of  Magdalen 
College,  "against  which,"  as  Croker  told 
the  Duke  of  Wellington,  "James  the  Sec- 
ond ran  his  head.''  The  monument  most 
closely  connected  with  the  hapless  dynasty 
is  the  noble  banqueting-house  at  Whitehall, 
out  of  the  window  of  which  Charles  I. 
passed  to  the  scaffold.  To  the  Stuarts, 
however,  may  fairly  be  ascribed  St.  Paul's, 
for  the  restoration  of  which  Charles  and 
Laud  began  to  collect  funds,  and  which  is  a 
monument  at  once  of  the  High  Church 
revival  and  of  the  prevalence  of  classical  or 
Italian  taste  in  architecture.  Nor  could  a 
dynasty  desire  a  nobler  monument.     Like 


THE    AGE    OF    THE    STUARTS.  39 

St.  Peter's,  St.  PauPs  is  wanting  in  poetry 
and  in  religious  impressiveness  compared 
with  the  cathedrals  of  the  Catholic  Middle 
Ages  ;  yet  it  is  a  magnificent  temple.  Few 
will  deny  that  externally  it  is  superior  to 
St.  Peter's.  Internally  it  is  far  inferior, 
Protestantism  having  stinted  the  decora- 
tions which  are  essential  to  a  rich  and 
luminous  effect.  These,  however,  an  effort 
is  now  being  made  to  supply.  A  more 
sinister  memorial  of  the  ecclesiastical  reac- 
tion is  the  porch  of  the  University  Church 
at  Oxford,  built  by  Laud,  and  surmounted 
with  the  image,  hateful  to  Puritan  eyes,  of 
the  Virgin  and  the  child.  The  statue  of 
Charles  stands  at  Charing  Cross  on  the 
pedestal  from  which  triumphant  Puritanism 
once  cast  it  down,  and  the  statue  of  James 
II.,  left  unmolested  over  the  gateway  of 
University  College,  Oxford,  bespeaks  the 
comparative  mildness  of  the  Second  Revo- 
lution. Great  houses,  such  as  historic 
Wilton  and  Long  Leat,  in  which  the  genius 
of  Inigo  Jones  displayed  itself  in  presiding 
over  the  transition  from  the  Tudor  to  the 
Italian  style,  are  also  memorials  of  the 
reign  of  Charles  I.  Of  the  reign  of  Charles 
II.  the  most  characteristic  memorials  are 
the  portraits  of  beauties  at  Hampton 
Court. 


40  A    TRIP   TO   ENGLAND. 

Of  the  Augustan  age  of  Anne,  with  its 
classic  tastes  and  its  privileges,  its  not 
unpicturesque  formality  and  its  grand 
manners,  Blenheim  Palace  is  the  typical 
monument.  A  stately  monument  it  is,  and, 
more  than  any  other  building  in  England 
except  Windsor  Castle,  worthy  of  the  name 
of  a  palace,  though  perhaps  its  style  may  be 
open  to  the  charge  of  being  at  once  heavy 
and  fantastic.  Nothing  in  England  vies 
with  the  si)lendours  of  Louis  XIV.  so  much 
as  the  abode  built  by  public  gratitude  for 
his  conqueror.  For  the  conqueror  of 
Napoleon  it  was  intended  to  build  a  coun- 
terpart of  Blenheim  at  Strathfieldsaye,  but 
the  simplicity  and  thrift  of  Wellington  put 
the  money  in  the  funds,  and  were  contented 
with  the  enlargement  of  a  common  country 
house.  There  is  something  about  Blenheim 
exactly  corresponding  to  the  historic  figure 
of  the  great  captain  and  diplomatist,  with 
that  superb  manner  which  almost  made 
knavery  august.  Let  us  remember  that  the 
age  had  not  only  its  Marlborough,  Godol- 
phin,  and  Pope,  but  its  Newton,  Locke,  and 
Bentley.  It  was  a  period  in  all  lines  of 
solid  greatness.  The  latter  histoiy  of  Blen- 
heim is  not  happy.  The  palace  is  being 
rifled  of  its  objects  of  art  and  soon  perhaps 


THE    AGE    OF    THE    GEORGES.  4I 

may  be  rifled  of  its  historic  relics.  Such 
is  the  state  to  which  hereditary  dynasties, 
whether  royal  or  territorial,  are  exposed. 
A  visit  to  Blenheim  should  on  no  account 
be  omitted.  Besides  the  Palace  you  will 
see  there  an  excellent  specimen  of  that 
lovely  appanage  of  British  wealth  and  rank, 
the  Park,  with  its  immemorial  oaks,  and 
the  deer  trooping  through  its  ferny  glades. 
Why  cannot  those  who  inherited  such 
abodes  manage  to  be  moral  and  happy  ? 
Because,  as  a  rule,  there  is  no  virtue  with- 
out labour. 

Of  the  period  of  the  Georges  the  chief 
monuments  are  the  palaces  built  in  the 
classical  or  Italian  style  by  the  heads  of  the 
great  Houses  which  then  ruled  England, 
swaying  Parliament  through  their  territorial 
influence  and  their  nomination  boroughs, 
sharing  among  them  a  vast  patronage  and 
reducing  the  monarchy  to  the  state  of  pupil- 
age from  which  George  III.  at  last  strug- 
gled to  set  himself  free.  Among  the  most 
splendid  of  these  palaces  are  Stowe,  Chats- 
worth,  and  Castle  Howard.  Clumber,  the 
seat  of  Horace  Walpole's  Duke  of  New- 
castle, the  arch  borough-monger  and  in- 
trig-uer  of  his  day,  is  more  splendid  within 
than  imposing  without.    These  great  houses 


42  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND . 

were  full  of  objects  of  historic  interest ;  but 
one  after  another,  by  the  sad  law  of  family 
decadence,  they  fell  into  spendthrift  hands  ; 
and  the  wreck  of  Stowe,  after  the  ruin  of 
the  powerful  house  of  Buckingham,  was  a 
catastrophe  of  aristocracy  as  well  as  a  carni- 
val of  the  auctioneer. 

Oxford  and  Cambridge  belong  at  once  to 
the  past  and  to  the  present.  These  univer- 
sity cities,  with  their  numerous  colleges,  are 
peculiar  to  England.  In  Canada  and  the 
United  States  each  college  is  a  university. 
But  the  universities  of  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge are  federations  of  colleges.  The 
university  is  the  federal  authority,  holds  the 
examinations,  gi'ants  all  the  degrees  and 
honours,  and  through  its  staff  of  professors 
carries  on  the  higher  teaching  ;  though  the 
duties  of  an  Oxford  or  Cambridge  professor 
are  held  to  consist  as  much  in  the*  advance- 
ment of  learning  or  science  as  in  teaching, 
with  which  he  is  not  overburdened.  It  is 
governed  by  a  university  council  and  a 
legislature.  But  each  college  is  a  corpora- 
tion in  itself,  having,  so  to  speak,  its  own 
state  rights,  holding  and  administering  its 
own  estates,  governed  by  its  own  Head  and 
Fellows,  exercising  discipline  over  its  own 


THE    UNIVERSITIES.  43 

Students  within  its  walls,  and  conducting 
the  ordinary  teaching  through  its  staff  of 
tutors.  The  immediate  and  the  closer  tie 
of  the  student  is  to  his  college,  while  the 
higher  tie  is  to  the  university.  Originally, 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  were  like  the  Ger- 
man universities  at  the  present  day,  the 
students  not  being  collected  in  colleges,  but 
boarding  in  private  houses  or  in  hostels. 
In  the  thirteenth  century,  when  there  was 
a  gi'eat  awakening  of  intellectual  life  in 
Europe,  students  flocked  in  to  the  English 
as  well  as  to  the  other  universities.  There 
being  then  few  books,  knowledge  was  to  be 
attained  only  by  hearing  the  professors,  who 
taught  wherever  they  could  find  a  hall  or  a 
stand,  while  the  eager  crowd  of  students 
drank  the  words  of  wisdom  and  power  from 
their  lips.  Those  were  the  days  in  which 
Roger  Bacon  first  kindled  at  Oxford  the 
lamp  of  science,  and,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
fell  under  the  Church's  ban  as  a  professor 
of  unhallowed  aits.  Research,  since  the 
days  of  the  school  philosophy,  has  become 
more  rational  and  more  fruitful ;  but  never 
perhaps  has  it  been  so  full  of  hope  and 
romance  as  it  was  in  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury. Oxford,  which  afterwards  became 
the  citadel  of  Tory  reaction,  was  then  in  the 


44  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

van  of  progress,  political  and  religious  as 
well  as  scientific.  With  all  this  generous 
activity  of  mind  there  were  among  the 
youthful  population  of  the  academical  city 
much  disorder,  turbulence,  and  vice  ;  there 
were  affrays  between  nationalities  far 
bloodier  than  the  duels  of  German  student 
clubs.  Seehig  this,  and  at  the  same  time 
desiring  to  promote  learning.  Bishop  Walter 
de  Merton,  the  Chancellor  of  Henry  III., 
devised  an  institution  in  which  secular 
studies  might  be  combined  with  something 
of  the  strictness  of  monastic  discipline,  and 
with  daily  religious  worship.  Merton  Col- 
lege, his  foundation,  is  the  first  regular 
college,  and  the  dark  little  quadrangle, 
called,  nobody  knows  why,  "Mob  Quad," 
is  the  cradle  of  collegiate  life.  The  new 
institution  met  the  needs  of  the  time  ;  it 
prospered  and  was  imitated.  College  after 
college  grew  up  both  at  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge. The  taste  for  founding  them 
waxed  as  that  for  founding  monasteries 
waned.  Pre-eminent  among  them  at  Ox- 
ford were  New  College,  founded  by  William 
of  Wykeham,  Bishop  of  Winchester,  and 
Chancellor  of  Edward  III.,  to  which  a 
school  for  boys  at  AVinchester  was  attached 
as  a  seed-plot ;  ISIagdalen  College,  the  love- 


THE    COLLEGES.  45 

liest  of  all  homes  of  learning,  founded  by 
William  of  Waynflete,  another  Bishop  of 
Winchester,  and  Chancellor  of  Henry  VI., 
in  the  stormy  days  of  the  Wars  of  the 
Koses ;  Christ  Church,  the  splendid  Con- 
ception of  AVolsey,  and  magnificent  still, 
though  shorn  of  half  its  projected  grandeur 
by  its  founder's  fall  ;  and  at  Cambridge, 
Trinity,  with  its  ample  courts  and  the  pic- 
tures of  Xewton,  Bentley.  and  Bacon  in  its 
noble  hall.  The  type  of  all  is  a  quadrangle 
of  semi-monastic  character,  a  common 
dining-hall,  and  domestic  chapel.  Gradu- 
ally the  colleges  absorbed  the  free  univer- 
sity, and  at  last  all  students  were  con- 
strained by  law  to  be  members  of  colleges. 
In  the  Catholic  Middle  Ages  intellectual 
institutions  were  clerical ;  and  this  require- 
ment surviving,  with  a  mass  of  other  me- 
diseval  and  semi-monastic  regulations  em- 
bodied in  the  Statutes  of  Founders,  the 
epoch  to  which  they  belonged,  paralyzed 
the  colleges  after  the  Keformation  and 
made  them  and  the  universities  which  they 
had  absorbed  little  more  than  seminaries  of 
the  clerical  profession.  Oxford  especially 
sank  into  an  organ  of  the  Jacobite  clergy 
and  their  party.  The  consequence  was  a 
century  and  a  half  of  literary  and  scientific 


46  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

torpor,  redeemed  by  few  great  names,  of 
which  Cambridge,  where  practically  cleri- 
cism  prevailed  least,  had  the  most  illustrious. 
With  the  renewal  of  progress  in  the  present 
century  came  reform,  or  rather  emancipa- 
tion, and  Oxford  and  Cambridge  are  now 
once  more  in  the  van  of  intellectual  Eng- 
land, though  they  never  can  be  again  what 
they  were  in  the  thirteenth  century,  when 
the  only  source  of  knowledge  was  the  oral 
teaching  of  the  professor.  Perhaps  they 
will  always  be  centres  of  learning  more  than 
of  experimental  science,  which  takes  the 
world  for  its  field. 

A  great  change  has  lately  come  not  only 
over  the  literary,  but  over  the  social  life  of 
the  colleges.  The  mediaeval  fraternities  of 
students  being  clerical,  were  celibate,  nor 
did  the  structure  and  arrangements  of  the 
college  admit  family  life.  From  the  reten- 
tion of  the  statutable  celibacy,  while  me- 
dicBval  asceticism  was  discarded,  grew  the 
social  life  of  the  college  Common  Room. 
That  life  was  pleasant  enough  while  the 
Fellow  was  young  ;  but  its  luxury  palled  at 
last,  and  as  years  crept  on  it  became  dreary, 
and  was  gladly  exchanged  for  a  college 
benefice,  on  which  the  Fellow  could  marry. 
The  retention   of  ceUbacy  indeed  had  an- 


OXFOKD    AND    CAMBRIDGE.  47 

Other  and  a  curious  effect  on  specially  cler- 
ical and  religious  natures :  combined  with 
the  mediaeval  character  of  the  buildings 
and  associations  it  had  a  tendency  to  revive 
the  monk,  and  thus  Oxford  Colleges  pro- 
duced Xewman  and  the  leaders  of  the 
Anglo-Catholic  reaction,  as  two  centuries 
before  they  had  been  the  nursing  mothers 
of  the  ecclesiastical  reaction  under  Laud. 
But  now  the  rule  for  celibacy  has  been 
relaxed,  and  a  circle  of  married  professors 
and  tutors  has  come  into  existence,  which, 
combining  intellectuality  with  the  simpli- 
city of  living  enforced  by  moderate  incomes, 
forms  a  society  about  as  pleasant  as  any  in 
the  world.  The  railway  brings  down  poli- 
ticians and  men  of  business  as  well  as  men 
of  letters,  to  pass  the  Sunday,  and  the 
pedantic  seclusion  of  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge from  the  world  is  now  a  thing  of  the 
past.  -There  is  no  use  in  transcribing  the 
guide  book.  Cambridge,  in  the  chapel  of 
King's  College,  has  a  single  glory  which 
Oxford  cannot  match,  and  certainly  noth- 
ing at  Oxford  can  charm  more  than  the 
walk  along  the  Cam  at  the  backs  of  the 
Cambridge  Colleges.  But  Oxford  is  a 
more  academic  city.  It  will  be  noted  that 
the  Gothic  style  lingered  there  with  other 


48  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

traces  of  the  Middle  Ages,  to  the  time  of 
Charles  I.  The  local  stone,  of  which  some 
of  the  colleges  are  built,  soon  changes 
colour  under  the  action  of  the  weather. 
An  American  visitor,  pointing  to  a  black- 
looking  pile,  asked  his  host  whether  that 
building  was  not  very  old.  "Oh,  no!" 
was  the  reply,  "  its  colour  deceives  you  ;  it 
has  not  been  built  much  more  than  two 
hundred  y eai-s. ' '  With  this  may  be  coupled 
the  story  of  a  Fellow  of  a  College,  who, 
being  asked  how  they  managed  to  get  such 
perfect  sward  in  those  Oxford  lawns,  re- 
plied, "It  is  the  simplest  thing  in  the 
world ;  you  have  only  to  mow  and  roll 
regularly  for  about  four  hundred  years." 
The  recent  revival  of  the  universities  has 
caused  large  modern  additions  to  the  build- 
ings, of  the  taste  of  which  the  visitor  will 
judge.  At  Oxford,  unfortunately,  some  of 
the  new  buildings  are  too  large  for  the  gen- 
eral scale  of  the  city,  which  is  small.  Let 
not  the  visitor  to  Oxford  omit  to  get  a  gen- 
eral view  from  the  top  of  the  Sheldonian 
Theatre  or  of  the  Radcliffe  Library.  Let 
him  not  omit  to  get  a  distant  view  from 
Hinksey  (after  reading  Matthew  Arnold's 
poem),  Bagley,  Whytham,  or  Stowe  Wood, 
Oxford  should  be  visited  in  May  or  early  in 


OXFORD    AND    CAMBRIDGE.  49 

June,  when  the  place  is  at  once  in  its  full 
beauty  and  thoroughly  academical.  At 
Commemoration  time,  which  people  are  apt 
to  choose,  Oxford  is  not  a  university,  but  a 
vast  banqueting  hall  and  ball  room,  full  of 
revellers  brought  together  under  pretence 
of  seeing  honorary  degrees  conferred  and 
hearing  prize  poems  recited.  A  guest  at 
Commemoration  time  may  well  fancy  that 
student  life  at  Oxford  and  Cambridge  is 
fully  portrayed  by  descriptions  of  the  fast 
student,  such  as  Verdant  Green,  or  by  the 
first  plate  of  Frith's  series,  "The  Road  to 
Ruin."  There  is  too  much  of  this  sort  of 
thing  in  universities  which  are  the  resort  of 
wealth  and  aristocracy  ;  but  there  are  also 
hard  study,  high  aspirations,  ardent  friend- 
ships, and  all  the  romance  which,  especially 
among  the  cultured  and  active-minded, 
hovers  about  the  portals  of  life.  Of  late 
student  tastes,  like  those  of  society  in  gen- 
eral, seem  to  have  grown  softer  and  more 
refined.  At  many  of  the  windows  in  the 
dark  old  quadrangle  there  are  boxes  of 
flowers,  and  from  many  rooms  the  sound 
of  the  piano  is  heard. 

It  is  perhaps  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge  in 
the  summer  term,  when  the  boat  races  and 
the    cricket    matches    are   going  on,   that 

D 


50  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

English  atlileticism  can  best  be  seen.  A 
gay  and  animating  sight  is  a  boat  race, 
^Yhile  a  cricket  match  is  apt  to  be  tedious 
to  the  uninitiated.  Athleticism,  in  its  pres- 
ent prominence,  not  to  say  its  present 
extravagance,  is  a  recent  development,  and 
finds  a  philosophical  justification  in  the  re- 
cently recognized  importance  of  the  physi- 
cal basis  of  humanity.  AVe  have  yet  to  see 
whether  it  will  develop  health  as  well  as 
muscle,  and  force  of  character  as  well  as 
force  of  body.  Instead  of  increased  force 
of  character  there  has  been  of  late  in  public 
life  rather  an  ominous  exhibition  of  levity 
and  fatalism.  After  all,  games  and  exer- 
cises carried  beyond  a  certain  measure, 
though  they  may  not  injure  the  body  like 
some  other  indulgences,  are  but  dissipations 
to  the  mind.  They  often  serve  as  a  safe- 
guard, it  is  true,  against  dissipations  of  a 
worse  sort. 

Not  to  be  omitted  in  taking  even  a  bird's- 
eye  view  of  England  are  the  Public  Schools. 
To  define  a  Public  School  would  perhaps  be 
difficult.  If  you  make  size  or  importance 
the  test,  you  cannot  exclude  Rugby  or 
Cheltenham.  If  you  make  antiquity  the 
test,  you  can  hardly  include  Harrow.     But 


THE   GREAT   PUBLIC    SCHOOLS.         5 1 

the  three  schools  which  play  in  the  Public 
School  cricket  matches  are  Eton,  Winches- 
ter, and  Harrow.  Harrow  has  practically 
taken  the  place  of  Westminster,  which  was- 
long  the  most  famous  of  the  group,  and  in 
the  last  century  sent  forth  a  long  line  of 
worthies,  but  has  recently  been  depressed  by 
the  disadvantage  of  a  situation  less  healthy 
than  historic.  It  is  at  the  Public  School 
matches  that  the  singular  feeling  connected 
with  these  institutions  is  displayed  in  its  ut- 
most intensity,  and  to  attend  one  of  them 
should  therefore,  if  possible,  be  a  part  of 
the  programme.  Nowhere  else  in  the  world, 
probably,  can  a  great  crowd  of  the  govern- 
ing classes  be  seen  in  a  state  of  wild  excite- 
ment over  a  boys'  game.  The  chief  claim 
of  Winchester  to  be  one  of  the  privileged 
three  is  perhaps  antiquity,  in  which  it  ex- 
cels all  the  rest,  having  been  the  school 
founded  by  the  great  mediaeval  restorer  of 
education,  AVilliam  of  Wykeham,  beneath 
the  shadow  of  his  own  most  venerable 
cathedral,  to  supply  scholars  to  the  college 
which  he  founded  at  Oxford.  Eton  and 
Harrow,  but  especially  Eton,  are  the 
schools  of  the  aristocracy,  and  their  pe- 
culiar character  is  in  fact  that  of  the  class 
to  which  the  boys  belong.     They  are   the 


52  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

special  training-places  of  the  English  "gen- 
tleman." The  strong  point  of  the  English 
gentleman  is  not  hard  work,  nor  is  hard 
work  the  strong  point  of  Eton  or  Harrow, 
though  the  system  of  instruction  has  been 
greatly  improved  of  late,  and  it  can  no 
longer  be  said,  as  it  might  have  been  said 
fifty  years  ago,  that  the  only  things  to  be 
learned  at  Eton  are  a  little  Latin  and 
Greek  and  a  great  deal  of  cricket  and  rowing. 
The  strong  points  are  the  union  of  freedom 
with  discipline,  and  the  generous  character 
of  the  social  law  which  the  boys  uphold 
among  themselves.  Harrow  is  close  to 
London,  but  there  is  nothing  in  the  way  of 
antiquities  to  see.  Eton  is  within  half-an- 
hour's  run  of  London  by  rail,  and  may  be 
taken  in  a  day  with  Windsor  ;  and  at  Eton 
there  is  a  great  deal  in  the  way  of  antiqui- 
ties, as  well  as  in  that  of  educational  pe- 
culiarities, to  be  seen.  That  ancient  quad- 
rangle, with  the  great,  gray  chapel  rising 
over  its  other  buildings,  and  the  statue  of 
the  Plantagenet  founder  in  its  centre,  the 
green  expanse  of  the  playgroimd  shaded  by 
stately  elms  stretching  beside  it,  and  the 
castle  palace  of  the  English  kings  looking 
down  on  it  from  the  other  side  of  the 
Thames,  is  of  all  places  of  education  about 


THE    GREAT    PUBLIC    SCHOOLS.  53 

the  most  historic ;  and  history  is  worth 
something-  in  a  place  of  education.  The 
equipments  of  the  great  scliool  room  would 
hardly  satisfy  a  school  board  in  these  days 
of  progi-ess  ;  but  on  its  rough  panels  are  to 
be  seen,  carved  by  boyish  hands,  names 
which  afterwards  became  illustrious  in  the 
annals  of  England.  Those  who  think  of 
education  only  will  go  to  Rugby,  and  pay 
their  devotions  at  the  shrine  of  Dr.  Arnold, 
after  reading  Stanley's  Life  of  the  great 
school  reformer. 

Of  the  British  Monarchy  the  official  and 
diplomatic  seat  is  St.  James',  a  dingy  and 
shabby  pile  of  brick,  which  by  its  mean- 
ness, compared  with  the  Tuileries  and  Ver- 
sailles aptly  symbolizes  the  relation  of  the 
power  which  built  it  to  that  of  the  Monarchy 
of  Louis  XIV.  The  power  which  built  St. 
James'  has,  however,  by  reason  of  its  very 
feebleness,  managed  to  prolong  its  existence; 
while  the  power  which  built  the  Tuileries 
and  Versailles,  having  by  its  despotism 
provoked  the  revolutionary  storm,  has  been 
laid  with  all  its  grandeurs  in  the  dust.  At 
St.  James'  are  still  held  the  Levees.  But 
those  rooms  having  been  found  too  small 
for  the  prodigiously  increasing  crowd  of 
ladies,  foreign  and  colonial,  who  pant,  by 


54  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

passing  under  the  eye  of  Royalty,  to  obtain 
the  baptism  of  fashion,  the  Drawing-Rooms 
are  now  held  in  Buckingham  Palace.  ''  Ex- 
clusiveness  "  was  pronounced  by  a  Canadian 
professor  of  etiquette  to  be  the  character- 
istic charm  of  the  Queen's  Drawing-Rooms. 
But  instead  of  being  exclusive,  a  Drawing- 
Room  will  soon  become  a  mob.  Though 
the  political  sceptre  has  departed  from 
British  Royalty  the  social  sceptre  has  not. 
Conscious  apparently  of  its  loss  of  political 
power,  Royalty  has  of  late  retired  into 
private  residences,  where  the  enthusiastic 
worshipper  or  the  enterprising  reporter  can 
only  reconnoitre  it  through  the  telescope. 
Here  it  leads  a  domestic  life,  goes  picnicking, 
and  records  its  picnics  together  with  family 
occurrences  in  its  diary.  Even  in  death  it 
seems  inclined  to  separate  itself  from  the 
monarchs  who  wore  a  real  crown.  It  has 
its  private  mausoleum  at  Frogmore,  apart 
from  the  tombs  of  the  Kings  in  St.  George's 
Chapel  and  at  "Westminster.  The  Hano- 
verians, moreover,  have  always  remained  a 
German  family  with  German  habits,  tastes, 
and  friendships,  as  well  as  German  connec- 
tions. The  modern  town  residence  of  Roy- 
alty, Buckingham  Palace,  is  large  without 
being  magnificent,  and  devoid  of  interest  of 


THE    ROYAL    PALACES.  55 

any  kind,  historical  or  architectural.  The 
edifice  belongs  to  the  Regency,  and  the 
Regent  liked  low  ceilings.  He  who  wants 
to  see  State  apartments  without  stateliness 
may  see  them  here.  It  is  to  the  ancient 
seats  of  the  Monarchy  that  the  interest 
belongs.  First  among  these  must  be  named 
the  Tower,  built  originally  by  the  Conqueror 
to  curb  London,  afterwards  the  fortress- 
palace  of  his  descendants,  and  in  the  end  the 
State  prison,  from  which  a  long  procession 
of  the  ill-starred  great  went  forth  to  lay  their 
heads  on  the  block  on  Tower  Hill ;  while 
State  murders,  like  those  of  Henry  VI.  and 
the  two  young  sons  of  Edward  IV.,  were 
done  in  the  dark  chambers  of  the  Tower  it- 
self. Evers'body  knows  Macaulay's  passage 
on  the  graves  in  the  chapel.  The  Bastile  has 
been  razed,  the  Tower  has  become  a  show, 
and  in  their  respective  fates  they  typify  the 
contrast  between  French  Revolution  and 
British  progress.  Of  Westminster,  the  his- 
toric seat  of  the  Monarchy  in  former  days, 
nothing  remains  but  that  glorious  hall,  the 
name  of  which  is  more  associated  with 
justice  than  with  Royalty,  and  the  banquet- 
ing house  at  Whitehall,  with  its  window  of 
tragic  memory.  But  of  all  the  Royal 
palaces  the  noblest,  the  only  one  indeed 


56  A    TRIP    TO    EXGLAND. 

worthy  of  the  name,  is  "Windsor,  built  in 
the  times  when  the  Kings  of  England  were 
Kings  indeed.  It  may  well  challenge  com- 
parison with  Versailles,  so  far  as  a  creation 
of  the  Plantagenets  can  be  compared  with 
a  creation  of  Louis  XIV,  It  is  disappoint- 
ing to  find  how  much  of  Windsor  is  the 
work  of  the  restorer,  and  of  a  restorer  who 
wrought  before  a  real  knowledge  of  mediae- 
val architecture  had  been  recovered.  Still 
nothing  can  spoil  the  effect  of  such  a  pile  on 
such  a  site.  The  Round  Tower  has  been 
raised,  but  still  it  is  the  Round  Tower.  The 
glory"  of  St.  George's  Chapel  is  unimpaired, 
and  above  the  stalls  may  be  read  the  names 
of  the  first  Knights  of  the  Garter,  the  com- 
rades in  arms  of  Edward  III.  and  the  Black 
Prince.  These  heroic  adventurers  are  now 
rather  curiously  represented  by  a  set  of 
elderly  gentlemen  in  purple  velvet  cloaks 
and  white  satin  tights,  who  chiefly  prize  the 
Garter,  as  one  of  them  avowed,  because  it 
is  the  only  thing  nowadays  that  is  not 
given  by  merit.  In  St.  George's  Hall, 
modernized  though  it  is,  imagination  may 
assemble  again  the  victors  of  Crecy  and 
Poictiers,  with  their  brave  Queen  and  her 
ladies,  holding  festivals  which  were  en- 
nobled by  the  recollection  of  glorious  toils. 


^yINDSOR   CASTLE.  57 

Long  afterwards  it  was  that  the  body  of  the 
iUustrious  successor  of  Edward  was  borne 
across  the  courts  of  Windsor  amidst  the 
falling  snow,  and  beneath  the  fierce  glances 
of  revolutionary  soldiery,  without  funeral 
pomp  or  requiem,  to  its  nameless  grave. 
Around  the  Castle  still  stretches  the  great 
Park,  and. not  many  years  ago  a  leafless 
trunk  in  it  was  shown  as  Heme  the  Hunt- 
er's Oak.  Between  Windsor  and  Staines 
lies  Runnymede,  where  the  camps  of  John 
and  his  Barons  once  faced  each  other, 
where  it  was  decided  that  the  British  Mon- 
archy should  not  be  despotic  but  constitu- 
tional, and  in  the  rude  but  vigorous  form 
of  the  Great  Charter  the  first  of  European 
constitutions  was  framed.  Eltham,  not  far 
from  London,  was  another  seat  of  the  Plan- 
tagenets  and  retains  traces  of  its  grandeur. 
Its  memories  are  sad,  since  it  saw  the 
degraded  dotage  of  Edward  III,  Hampton 
Court  claims  a  visit.  One  of  its  quad- 
rangles and  its  magnificent  hall  are  the 
monuments  of  Wolsey's  soaring  ambition  ; 
but  with  these  is  combined  the  little  Ver- 
sailles of  Louis  the  Fourteenth's  arch-en- 
emy, William  the  Third,  and  the  gardens 
laid  out  by  Dutch  William's  taste,  and  now, 
in  summer,   gorgeous   with  such  beds   of 


58  A    TRIP   TO   ENGLAND. 

flowers  as  Dutch  William  never  beheld. 
Here  Cromwell  used  to  rest  after  his  week 
of  overwhelming  care,  and  here,  in  quieter 
times,  the  last  sovereign  of  Charles'  house, 
"  Great  Anne,"  used  "sometimes counsel  to 
take  and  sometimes  tea."  The  chestnuts 
in  the  neighbouring  park  of  Bushey  are  the 
glory  of  English  trees.  Kensington  and 
Kew,  minor  seats  of  Royalty,  have  their 
reminiscences  and  their  anecdotes  of  the 
Court  of  George  III.  and  Charlotte. 

"The  British  infantry,"  said  the  French 
General  Foy,  "is  the  best ;  fortunately  there 
is  very  little  of  it."  Of  the  cavalry  there  is 
still  less.  Sea-girt  Britain  owed  the  preser- 
vation of  her  political  liberties  in  no  small 
measure  to  the  absence  of  any  necessity 
for  a  great  standing  army.  Even  now, 
when  instead  of  being  girt  by  any  sea  her 
members  are  scattered  over  the  globe,  and 
five-sixths  of  the  population  of  her  Empne 
are  in  Asia,  her  standing  army  is  a  mere 
"thin  red  line"  compared  with  the  hosts 
of  the  great  military  Powers.  Seventy 
thousand  British  soldiers  hold  India,  with 
its  two  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  peo- 
ple. Of  the  Duke  of  Wellington's  seventy 
thousand  at  Waterloo,  not  thirty  thousand 


THE   ARMY   AND   NA\^.  59 

were  British,  and  it  is  doubtful  whether 
England  has  ever  put  more  than  thirty 
thousand  men  of  her  own  on  any  field  of 
battle.  The  stranger,  therefore,  will  see 
little  of  the  military  manifestations  of 
power,  or  of  the  pride,  pomp,  and  circum- 
stance of  war.  In  St.  James'  Park  he  may 
see,  and  if  he  cares  for  the  Old  Flag,  he 
will  see  not  without  proud  and  pensive 
emotion,  the  march  of  the  Guards.  Thirty 
years  ago,  had  he  been  standing  on  that 
spot,  he  might  have  seen  the  Guards  march 
in  with  the  majestic  simplicity  which  marks 
the  triumph  of  the  true  soldier,  their  uni- 
forms and  bearskins  weather-stained  by 
Crimean  storms,  and  their  colours  torn  by 
the  shot  of  Alma  and  Inkerman.  He  may 
also  see  the  array  of  Cuirassiers,  superb 
and  glittering,  but  a  relic  of  the  past ;  for, 
since  the  improvement  of  the  rifle,  the 
Cuirassier,  whose  armour  would  be  pierced 
like  pasteboard,  has  become  almost  as  use- 
less as  an  elephant.  These  corps  are  also 
memorials  of  the  times  in  which  the  army 
was  an  appanage  of  the  aristocracy,  who 
amused  their  youth  with  soldiering,  went 
through  no  professional  training,  and  as 
leaders  of  the  troops  in  the  field  were,  as 
Carlyle  says,  "valiant  cocked  hats  upon  a 


6o  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

pole."  Valiant  the  cocked  hat,  beyond 
question,  was,  as  many  a  hillside  stained 
with  blood,  and  with  the  blood  of  the 
Guards  not  least,  proved ;  and  as  even 
Fontenoy,  though  a  lost  field,  could  bear 
witness.  But  Lord  Cardwell  and  Lord 
Wolseley  changed  all  this.  The  British 
army  is  now,  like  the  armies  of  the  Conti- 
nent, professional :  it  will  henceforth  bring 
science  as  well  as  valour  into  the  field. 
Those  who  would  see  it  manoeuvre  must  go 
to  Aldershot. 

To  Aldershot  the  visitor  must  go  to  see 
the  regular  army  ;  but  by  going  to  the  Vol- 
unteer Eeview  at  Easter,  wherever  it  may 
be  held,  or  even  to  one  of  the  district  re- 
views, he  may  see  the  military  spirit  com- 
bined with  the  patriotism  of  the  country. 
What  the  volunteers  are  actually  worth  as 
a  force  in  case  of  war  it  must  be  left  to  the 
professional  soldier  to  determine.  They 
are  good  stuff,  at  all  events,  for  an  army, 
and  some  of  the  corps  are  well  drilled. 
But  the  Volunteer  movement  may  be  safely 
pronounced  the  most  wholesome  that  there 
has  been  in  England  for  many  a  year. 
More  than  anything  else  on  the  social  or 
political  horizon,  it  gives  reason  for  hope 
that  the  destinies  of  the  country  will  be 


THE    ARMY    AND    NAVY.  6l 

determined  in  the  last  resort  by  the  spirit 
which  has  made  it  great. 

The  other  and  the  stronger  arm  of  Eng- 
land is  to  be  seen  at  Portsmouth  and  Ply- 
mouth, unless  you  should  be  lucky  enough 
to  come  in  for  a  display  of  its  full  might  at 
a  naval  review.  But  the  British  navy  no 
longer  appears  in  the  guise  of  the  gi'eat 
sailing  ships  which  fifty  years  ago  we  used 
to  see  moving  in  their  majesty  and  beauty 
over  the  waters  of  Plymouth  Sound  or  of 
Spithead.  The  very  name  sailor  is  now,  as 
regards  the  navy,  almost  an  anachronism. 
Old  Admiral  Farragut,  when  desired  by  his 
Government  to  transfer  his  flag  from  a 
wooden  ship  to  an  ironclad,  replied,  that 
he  did  not  want  to  go  to  what  the  Revised 
Version  calls  "  Hades  "  in  a  tea-kettle.  To 
Hades  in  a  tea-kettle,  in  case  of  a  naval 
w^ar,  many  a  British  seaman  would  now  go. 
These  wonderful  machines,  the  latest  off- 
spring of  the  science  of  destruction,  are 
fraught  with  far  more  terrible  thunders 
than  the  ships  of  Rodney  and  Xelson  ;  but 
the  grandeur  and  romance  of  the  navy  are 
gone.  AVhat  will  be  the  result  of  a  collision 
between  two  of  these  monsters,  with  their 
armour,  their  colossal  guns,  and  their  tor- 
pedoes, who  can  undertake  to  say  ?     It  is 


62  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

difficult  to  believe  that  the  old  qualities  of 
the  British  tar,  his  aptitude  for  close  fight- 
ing and  for  boarding,  would  preserve  their 
ascendancy  unimpaired.  It  is  difficult  also 
to  believe  that  in  these  days  of  steam  it 
^vould  be  as  easy  as  once  it  vras  to  guard 
the  shores  of  the  island  against  the  sudden 
descent  of  an  enemy.  But  these  are  the 
dread  secrets  of  the  future.  Some  of  the 
men-of-war  of  former  days  may  still  be 
seen  laid  up  at  the  war  ports ;  and,  no 
doubt,  while  her  timbers  can  hold  together, 
the  Victory  will  be  preserved,  and  we  shall 
be  allowed  to  see  the  spot  on  which  Nelson 
fell.  But  the  best  memorial  of  the  old 
British  navy,  perhaps,  is  Turner's  picture 
of  the  Fighting  Temeraire. 

Still  Great  Britain  is  an  island.  The 
maritime  tastes  of  her  people  are  strong  ; 
and  though  steam  yachts  are  coming  in,  at 
Cowes  and  on  Southampton  "Water  the 
beauty  of  the  sailing  vessel,  though  not  the 
majesty  of  the  line-of-battle  ship  under  can- 
vas, is  yet  to  be  seen. 

The  immense  debt  of  England  to  her  sail- 
ors is  not  unworthily  represented  by  Green- 
wich Hospital,  which  is  also  a  fit  monument 
of  William  and  Mary.  A  monument  it  now 
is  and  nothing  more.     The  veterans  are  no 


COUNTRY   LIFE.  6;^ 

longer  to  be  seen  grouped  in  its  courts  on  a 
summer  day  and  talking  about  their  battles 
and  voyages.  The  rules  of  the  institution 
galled  them,  and  they  preferred  to  take 
their  pensions,  with  homes  of  their  o\Yn, 
though  on  the  humblest  scale. 

In  describing  almost  any  other  land  than 
England,  notably  in  describing  France,  we 
should  go  first  to  its  capital,  as  the  centre 
of  its  life.  But  in  England  the  centre  of 
life  is  not  in  the  capital,  but  in  the  country  ; 
hitherto  at  least  this  has  been  the  case, 
though  now,  in  England  as  elsewhere,  there 
is  an  ominous  set  of  population  from  the 
country  to  the  city.  Hitherto  country  soci- 
ety has  been  the  best  society,  ownership  of 
land  in  the  country  has  been  the  great  ob- 
ject of  ambition,  the  country  has  been  the 
eniei  seat  of  political  power,  and  for  that, 
as  well  as  for  the  social  reason,  land  has 
borne  a  fancy  price.  Every  lawyer,  physi- 
cian, and  man  of  business  has  looked  for- 
ward after  making  his  fortune  in  the  city  to 
ending  his  life  in  a  country  house  ;  every 
city  mechanic  has  kept,  if  he  could,  some 
plant  or  bird  to  remind  him  of  the  country. 
A  charm  attaches  in  all  our  minds  to  the 
idv;>a  of  English  country  life.     The  organiza- 


64  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

tion  of  that  life,  widely  different  from  any- 
thing which  exists  on  this  continent,  may 
be  surveyed,  in  a  certain  sense,  from  the 
train.  Everywhere  in  the  rural  districts  as 
you  shoot  along  your  eye  catches  the  tower 
or  spire  of  the  parish  church,  with  the  rec- 
tory adjoining,  the  hall  of  the  squire,  the 
homestead  of  the  tenant  farmer,  and  the 
labourer's  cottage.  The  little  dissenting 
chapel,  which  steals  away  a  few  religious 
rustics  from  the  parish  church,  and  repre- 
sents social  as  well  as  religious  antagonism 
to  the  "  squirearchy  and  hierarchy,"  hardly 
anywhere  obtrudes  itself  on  the  view.  The 
parish  is  the  Unit ;  it  is  thoroughly  a  unit 
so  far  as  the  common  people  are  concerned, 
not  only  of  rural  administration  but  of  so- 
ciety and  gossip.  Every  one  of  its  denizens 
knows  everything  about  all  the  rest,  and 
usually  none  of  them  knows  much  about 
the  world  outside.  Any  one  who  wished  to  lie 
hid  could  not  choose  a  worse  hiding-place 
than  one  of  these  apparently  sequestered 
communities,  in  which  not  only  no  strange 
man  but  no  strange  dog  could  well  escape 
notice  for  twenty-four  hours.  The  parish 
is  the  unit,  and  the  parish  church  is  still  the 
centre.  Even  those  who  go  to  the  meeting- 
house to  hear  the  Methodist  preacher  go  to 


COUNTRY   LIFE.  65 

the  church  for  christenings,  marriages,  and 
burials.  The  farmer,  though  no  theologian, 
is  a  churchman  by  habit ;  he  likes  to  meet 
his  fellow-farmers  at  church  on  Sunday  and 
to  gossip  with  them  after  and  before  ser- 
vice ;  not  to  do  so  seems  to  him  unsocial. 

The  clergyman  is  the  parish  almoner  ;  by 
him  or  his  wife,  a  personage  who,  if  she  is 
good  and  active,  is  second  only  to  him  in 
importance,  charitable  and  philanthropic 
organizations  are  headed.  When  he  plays 
iiis  part  well  he  is  the  general  friend  and 
adviser,  and  his  parsonage  is  the  centre  of 
the  village  civilization.  Herbert's  country 
parson  is  realized  in  his  life.  But  the  king 
of  the  little  realm  is  the  master  of  the  hall, 
which  is  seen  standing  in  the  lordly  seclu- 
sion of  its  park.  "The  stately  homes  of 
England,"  is  a  phrase  full  of  poetry  to  our 
ears,  and  the  life  of  the  dwellers  in  such 
homes,  as  fancy  presents  it,  is  the  object  of 
our  envious  admiration.  Life  in  a  home  of 
beauty  with  family  portraits  and  memories, 
fair  gardens,  and  ancestral  trees,  with  use- 
ful and  important  occupations  such  as  offer 
themselves  to  the  conscientious  squire,  yet 
without  any  of  the  dust  and  sweat  of  the 
vulgar  working  world,  ought  to  be  not  only 
pleasant  but  poetic ;    and    the    "  Sumner 


66  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

Place"  of  Tennyson's  Talking  Oak,  no 
doubt,  has  its  charming  counterpart  in  real- 
ity. But  all  depends  on  the  voluntary  per- 
formance of  social  duties,  without  which 
life  in  the  loveliest  and  most  historic  of 
manor  houses  is  merely  sybaritism,  aggra- 
vated by  contrast  with  the  opportunities 
and  surroundings ;  and  unfortunately  the 
voluntary  performance  of  duty  of  any  kind 
is  not  the  thing  to  which  human  nature  in 
any  of  us  is  most  inclined.  Not  one  man 
in  a  hundred,  probably,  will  undergo  real 
labour  without  the  spur  either  of  need  or  of 
ambition.  The  country  gentlemen  of  Eng- 
land are  seldom  dissolute,  the  healthiness 
of  their  sports  in  itself  is  an  antidote  to 
filthy  sensuality ;  but  many  of  them  are 
sportsmen  and  nothing  more.  Their  tem- 
per and  the  temper  of  all  those  around  them 
is  apt  to  be  tried  by  a  long  frost  which  sus- 
pends fox-hunting ;  and  they  too  often 
close  a  useless  life  by  a  peevish  or  morose 
old  age.  We  have  heard  of  one  who,  after 
riding  all  his  life  after  the  fox,  ended  his 
days  alone  in  a  great  mansion,  with  no  sol- 
ace when  he  was  bed- ridden  but  hearing  his 
huntsman  call  over  the  hounds  at  his  bed- 
side ;  and  of  another,  who  being  paralyzed 
on  one  side  could  find  no  diversion  for  his 


THE    COUXTKY    SQUIRE.  6"] 

declining  years  but  preserving  rabbits, 
which  eat  up  no  small  portion  of  the  prod- 
uce of  his  estate,  and  going  out  to  shoot 
them  in  a  cart,  seated  on  a  music-stool  by 
turning  on  which  he  could  manage  to  get 
his  shot.  Till  lately,  however,  the  squire 
at  all  events  lived  in  his  country-house 
among  his  tenants  and  people  ;  even  Squire 
Western  did  this  and  he  thus  retained  his 
local  influence  and  a  certain  amount  of 
local  popularity.  But  now  the  squire,  in- 
fected by  the  general  restlessness  and  thirst 
of  pleasure,  has  taken  to  living  much  in 
London  or  in  the  pleasure  cities  of  the  Con- 
tinent. The  tie  between  him  and  the  vil- 
lage had  thus  been  loosened,  and  in  many 
cases  entirely  broken.  The  first  Duke  of 
Wellington,  whenever  he  could  be  spared 
from  the  Horse  Guards  and  the  House  of 
Lords,  used  to  come  down  to  Strathfield- 
saye,  do  his  duty  as  a  country  gentleman, 
show  hospitality  to  his  neighbours,  and  go 
among  his  people  ;  his  successor  came  down 
now  and  then  to  a  battue,  bringing  his  party 
with  him  from  town.  And  now  another 
blow,  and  one  of  the  most  fatal  kind,  is 
about  to  be  struck  at  squirearchy  by  the 
political  reform  which  is  introducing  elec- 
tive government   into  the  counties.     Hith- 


68  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

erto  the  old  feudal  connection  between  land 
and  local  government  has  been  so  far  re- 
tained that  the  chief  landowners,  as  justices 
of  the  peace,  have  administered  rural  jus- 
tice and  collectively  managed  the  affairs  of 
the  county  in  Quarter  Sessions.  The  jus- 
tice, no  doubt,  has  sometimes  been  very 
rural,  especially  in  the  case  of  the  poacher, 
but  the  management  has  been  good,  and  it 
has  been  entirely  free  from  corruption. 
Government  by  the  people  would  be  the 
best  if  it  were  really  government  by  the 
people  ;  unfortunately  what  it  really  is  too 
often  and  tends  everywhere  to  be,  is  gov- 
ernment by  the  Boss.  Quarter  Sessions, 
however,  are  now,  in  deference  to  the  ten- 
dencies of  the  age,  to  be  replaced  by  elective 
councils,  from  which  the  small  local  politi- 
cian is  pretty  sure  in  the  end  to  oust  the 
squire,  who,  thus  left  without  local  dignity 
or  occupation,  will  have  nothing  but  field 
sports  to  draw  him  to  his  country  seat. 

Even  of  field  sports  the  end  may  be  near. 
Game-preserving  will  die  unlamented  by 
anybody  but  the  game-preserver,  for  slaugh- 
tering barn  door  pheasants  is  sorry  work, 
imprisoning  peasants  for  poaching  is  sorrier 
work  still,  and  the  temptation  to  poach  is 
a  serious  soiu-ce  of  rustic  demoralization. 


FOX   HUNTING.  69 

Fox-liunting  is  manly  as  well  as  exciting, 
and  overworked  statesmen  or  men  of  busi- 
ness say  that  they  find  it  the  best  of  all  re- 
freshments for  the  wearied  brain  ;  but  it  is 
in  great  peril  of  being  killed  by  high-pressure 
farming  which  will  not  allow  crops  to  be 
ridden  over  or  fences  to  be  broken,  com- 
bined with  the  growth  of  democratic  senti- 
ment. The  farmer  who  rode  with  the 
hounds  was  a  farmer  sitting  at  an  easy  rent 
and  with  time  as  well  as  a  horse  to  spare. 
So  if  anyone  cares  to  see  a  "  meet "  in  front 
of  a  manor  house,  with  the  gentlemen  of 
the  county  in  scarlet  on  their  hunters,  he 
had  better  lose  no  time.  In  seeing  the 
meet,  he  will  see  the  county  club  ;  for  this 
is  the^^reat  social  as  well  as  the  gi*eat  sport- 
ing gathering,  and  the  gentleman  in  an 
English  county  who  does  not  hunt  must 
find  his  life  somewhat  lonely  and  dull. 

Rents  have  fallen  immensely  in  conse- 
quence of  the  agricultural  depression,  caused 
by  the  intiux  of  American  and  Indian  grain 
into  the  British  market ;  nor  is  there  much 
hope  of  better  times.  Mortgage  debts  are 
heavy,  and  the  allowances  to  widows  and 
younger  brothers,  which  the  system  of  pri- 
mogeniture entails,  have  still  to  be  paid. 
Thus  the  situation  of  the  squire,  and  of  the 


70  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

social  structure  which  he  crowns,  is  perilous. 
Will  he  bravely  face  it  ?  Will  he  cut  down 
his  luxuries,  learn  agriculture,  become  his 
own  bailiff,  give  up  game-preserving,  and 
renounce  idleness  and  pleasure-hunting,  for 
a  life  of  labour  and  dutj-  ?  If  he  does,  agri- 
cultural depression  may  prove  to  him  a 
blessing  in  disguise.  But  it  is  too  likely 
that,  instead  of  this,  he  will  shut  up  the  Hall 
and  go  away  to  the  city,  or  perhaps  to  the 
Continent,  there  to  live  in  reduced  sybari- 
tism on  the  remnant  of  his  rents.  The  Hall 
will  then  either  stand  vacant,  like  the  cha- 
teau after  the  Revolution,  or  pass,  as  not  a 
few  of  them  have  already,  with  its  ancestral 
portraits  and  memories,  into  the  hands  of 
the  rich  trader  or  the  Jew,  perhaps  of  the 
American  millionnaire,  who  finds  better  ser- 
vice and  more  enjoyment  of  wealth  in  the 
less  democratic  world.  A  change  is  evidently 
at  hand,  for  land  can  no  longer  support 
the  three  orders  of  agriculture,  landlord, 
tenant  farmer,  and  labourer.  If  the  Estab- 
lished Church  is  abolished,  as  in  all  likeli- 
hood it  will  be,  and  the  rector  departs  as 
well  as  the  squire,  the  revolution  in  the  ru- 
ral society  of  England  will  be  complete. 

The  bodily  form  of  the  British  tenant 
farmer  is  known  to  us  all  from  a  himdred 


THE    BRITISH    FARMER.  7 1 

caricatures.  It  is  he  in  fact  who  figures  as 
John  Bull.  He  is  not  very  refined  or  highly 
educated;  sometimes  perhaps  he  is  not  so 
well  educated  as  the  labourer  who  has  been 
taught  in  the  village  school,  for  in  this  re- 
spect, as  possibly  in  some  others,  he  rather 
falls  between  the  stool  of  genteel  indepen- 
dence and  that  of  dependence  on  the  care 
of  the  State.  Tennyson's  Lincolnshire 
farmer  is  the  portrait  of  the  class  as  it  ex- 
ists or  existed  in  Tennyson's  boyhood  in 
a  county  which,  when  it  rebelled  against 
Henry  VIII.,  was  graciously  designated  by 
His  Majesty  as  "the  beastliest  county  in 
the  whole  kingdom  ; ' '  but  the  portrait  only 
requires  softening  to  make  it  pretty  gener- 
ally true.  The  British  farmer  is  strongly 
conservative,  in  all  senses,  and  if  left  to 
himself  unimproving.  Left  to  himself  he 
would  still  be  ploughing  with  four  horses  to 
his  plough.  To  make  him  yield  to  the  exi- 
gency of  the  time  and  give  up  his  imme- 
morial trade  of  wheat-growing  for  other 
kinds  of  production,  is  very  hard.  Being 
so  tenacious  of  old  habit,  he  does  not  make 
the  best  of  settlers  in  a  new  country. 
Nevertheless,  he  has  managed  to  make  the 
soil  of  his  island,  though  not  the  most  fer- 
tile, bear  the  largest  harvests  in  the  world. 


72  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

He  is  a  man  withal  of  solid  worth.  Politi- 
cally he  adheres  to  his  landlord,  who  is  also 
his  social  chief  and  his  oiiicer  in  the  yeo- 
manry. Between  him  and  the  labourer  the 
social  gulf  has  for  some  time  been  widening. 
They  have  entirely  ceased  to  sit  at  the  same 
board,  while  the  farmer's  wife  plays  the 
piano,  reads  novels,  and  bears  herself  as  a 
great  lady  towards  the  wife  of  the  labourer. 
The  antagonism  was  strongly  accentuated 
by  the  "  Revolt  of  the  Field"  under  Joseph 
Arch.  The  farmer,  however,  met  the  revolt 
with  a  firmness  from  which  a  salutary  lesson 
might  have  been  drawn  lay  public  men 
whose  nen'es  have  been  shattered  by  dem- 
agogism  so  that  they  have  learned  to  regard 
ever}'  outcrj-  as  the  voice  of  fate. 

A  great  change  has  come  within  two  gen- 
erations over  the  outward  vesture  of  English 
country  life.  The  old  style  of  farming, 
with  its  primitive  implements  and  anti- 
quated waj's,  with  its  line  of  mowers  and 
haymakers  in  the  summer  field,  with  the 
sound  of  its  flail  in  the  frosty  air,  and  with 
many  other  sights  and  sounds  which  linger 
in  the  memory  of  one  who  was  a  boy  in 
England  half  a  century  ago,  has  been  pass- 
ing away ;  the  new  agriculture  with  ma- 
chineiy  has  been  taking  its  place .    Gone  too. 


THE    FARM    LABOURER.  73 

or  fast  going,  is  the  clay  cottage,  with  the 
thatched  roof,  which  was  the  characteristic 
abode  of  Hodge,  the  farm  labourer,  and  the 
undermost  in  the  three  grades  of  the  agri- 
cultural hierarchy.  Improving  and  phil- 
anthropic landlordism  has  now  generally 
substituted  the  brick  house,  with  slated  roof, 
more  civilized  than  the  thatched  cottage, 
though  not  so  picturesque,  nor  perhaps  so 
comfortable,  for  the  thatch  was  much 
warmer  than  the  slate  in  winter  and  much 
cooler  in  summer.  A  corresponding  change 
has  been  taking  place  in  Hodge's  lot.  It 
was  much  needed.  Within  those  pictur- 
esque cottages,  even  when  they  were  covered 
with  roses,  too  often  dwelt  not  only  penury 
but  misery,  together  with  the  grossest  igno- 
rance, the  uncleanness,  physical  and  moral, 
which  is  the  consequence  of  overcrowding, 
and  the  hardening  of  the  heart  wiiich  must 
ensue  when  parent  and  child  cannot  both 
be  fed.  The  Union  Workhouse,  which  with 
its  grim  hideousness  deforms  the  rural 
landscape,  w'as  too  often  the  symbol  of 
Hodge's  condition,  as  well  as  the  miserable 
haven  of  his  toil-worn  and  rheumatic  age. 
But  now  his  wages  have  been  raised,  his 
dwelling  and  his  habits  have  been  improved, 
and  the  State  has  put  him  to  school ;  while 


74  A   TKIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

the  railroad  has  opened  to  him  the  labour 
market  of  the  whole  country,  whereas,  be- 
fore, he  was  confined  to  that  of  his  parish, 
and  was  practically,  like  the  serf  of  old, 
bound  to  the  soil,  and  forced  to  take  what- 
ever wages  the  farmer  of  his  parish  chose 
to  give  him.  At  last,  in  the  grand  Dutch 
auction  of  Party,  i)olitical  power  has  been 
thrust  upon  him,  and  he  has  suddenly  be- 
come arbiter  of  the  destinies  not  only  of 
England  but  of  two  hundred  and  fifty  mil- 
lions of  Lidia,  and  of  the  destinies  of  other 
lands  and  peoples  of  which  he  never  heard. 
It  need  hardly  be  said  that  he  votes  in  total 
darkness,  following  as  well  as  he  can  the 
voice  which  promises  him  ' '  three  acres  and 
a  cow."  Before  the  last  general  election 
those  who  knew  him  best  were  utterly  un- 
able to  divine  what  he  would  do,  though 
they  thought  that  having  failed  to  get  the 
promised  three  acres  and  a  cow  from  one 
party  he  would  most  likely  try  the  other,  as 
in  fact  he  did.  In  his  own  sphere  he  de- 
serves the  highest  respect.  Ko  man  has 
done  so  hard  a  day's  work  as  an  English 
labourer  ;  no  man  has  stood  so  indomitably 
as  a  soldier  on  the  bloodstained  hillside. 
If  he  has  too  much  frequented  the  village 
ale-house,  in  his  home  he  has  been  generally 


THE    COUNTRY    MANSION.  75 

true  and  kind  to  "his  old  woman,"  as  she 
has  been  to  "her  old  man,"  and  there  has 
been  a  touching  dignity  in  his  resignation 
to  his  hard  lot  and  in  the  mournful  com- 
placency Avith  which  he  has  looked  forward 
to  "  a  decent  burial."  He  has,  for  the 
most  part,  kept  out  of  the  workhouse  when 
he  could. 

The  mansions  of  the  squires  are  not  the 
only  mansions  which  meet  the  traveller's 
eye.  Almost  on  every  pleasant  spot,  es- 
pecially near  London,  you  see  handsome 
dwellings,  many  of  them  newly  built,  the 
offspring  of  the  wealth  which  since  the  in- 
stallation of  Free  Trade  has  been  advanc- 
ing "  by  leaps  and  bounds."  ISTot  a  few  of 
these  are  very  large  and  magnificent.  The 
architecture  of  those  recently  built  chal- 
lenges attention  and  generally  marks  the 
reversion  of  taste  to  the  old  English  style. 
But  the  general  aspect  is  rather  that  of 
luxury  than  that  of  stateliness,  in  which 
these  mansions  of  the  new  aristocracy  of 
wealth  certainly  fall  below  those  of  the 
Tudor  age.  The  details  may  be  studied 
and  correct,  but  the  mass  is  not  imposing 
and  the  front  is  seldom  fine.  Even  Eaton, 
the  newly -built  palace  of  the  Duke  of  West- 
minster, though  vast  and  sumptuoiLS,  lacks 
a  grand  facade. 


76  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

People  who  lived  in  England  half  a  cen- 
tury ago  remember  the  old  coimtry  town, 
as  it  is  depicted  in  Miss  Mitford's  Belford 
Hfgis,  with  its  remnant  of  timbered  and 
gabled  houses  and  its  unrestored  church. 
They  remember  the  quiet  that  reigned  in 
its  streets,  except  on  market-day,  or  at  the 
time  of  the  annual  fair,  which,  with  its 
wandering  merchants  and  showmen,  told 
of  the  commercial  habits  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  They  remember  the  equipages  of 
the  county  magnates  drawn  up  at  the  prin- 
cipal haberdashery  store.  They  remember 
the  Tory  and  moderately  corrupt  town 
council,  the  orthodox,  and  somewhat  drowsy 
parson,  the  banker  or  man  of  business  going 
placidly  on  with  his  one  post  a  day  and  no 
telegraph  or  telephone,  the  old-fashioned 
physician  driving  about  in  his  chariot  to 
give  his  patient  the  satisfaction  of  "dying 
regularly  by  the  Faculty,"  the  retired  ad- 
miral whose  fast  frigate  had  made  his  for- 
tune in  the  great  war,  the  retired  general 
who  had  served  under  Wellington,  the  re- 
tired East  Indian,  the  dowager  who  dwelt 
in  a  solid-looking  mansion,  surrounded  by 
shade  trees,  in  the  outskirts.  Those  people 
hardly  ever  left  home  ;  they  knew  repose, 
which  is  now  a  lost  art ;  the  workers  among 


THE    COUNTRY    TOWN.  'J'] 

them  enjoyed  their  holiday  in  leisure,  not 
in  travelling  as  far  as  they  could  by  rail. 
They  were  very  social,  too,  though  not  in 
the  most  intellectual  way.  The  same  town 
now  has  become  a  railroad  centre  ;  it  has 
trebled  its  size  ;  its  old  buildings  have  been 
pulled  down  ;  its  crooked  streets  have  been 
made  straight  by  local  improvement ;  its 
churches  have  been  restored  past  recog- 
nition ;  it  throbs  and  whizzes  with  prog- 
ress ;  its  society  is  no  longer  stationary  and 
quiet,  but  emigTating  and  restless ;  and 
next  door  neighbours  know  nothing  of 
each  other.  Not  all  our  material  improve- 
ments are,  at  least  in  their  present  stage, 
equally  improvements  of  our  social  state ; 
nor  have  all  the  "leaps  and  bounds"  of 
English  wealth  been  leaps  and  bounds  of 
happiness.  In  some  of  the  old  towns  in 
very  rural  districts  which  commerce  has 
passed  by,  the  ancient  tranquillity  reigns, 
few  new  houses  are  built,  and  people  still 
know  their  neighbours.  But  these  sanctu- 
aries of  dull  happiness  are  mere  accidents. 
Perhaps  there  will  some  day  be  a  subsidence 
after  the  ferment  of  invention  and  progress, 
a  less  eager  and  unsatisfied  race  will  enter 
into  the  heritage  of  these  labours,  and  the 
art  of  repose  will  be  recovered. 


78  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

If  the  old  life  of  the  rural  parish  and  the 
country  town  in  England  is  doomed,  its 
departure  will  put  an  end  to  not  a  few  ties 
and  relations  which  had  their  value  and 
their  charms  so  long  as  people  did  their 
duty.  So  thought  the  writer  of  these  pages 
as  from  the  top  of  a  cathedral  he  looked 
down  over  the  little  town,  with  old  man- 
sions on  its  outskirts,  to  the  country,  with 
its  halls  and  farm  houses  and  cottages  be- 
yond, and  saw  in  a  field  beneath  him  the 
volunteers  drilling  under  the  command  of 
the  local  gentlemen.  But  change  is  the 
law,  and  the  future  no  doubt  has  better 
things  in  store.  Only  let  us  remember  that 
movement  is  not  progress,  unless  it  tends  to 
happiness. 

England  has  no  Alps,  no  Rocky  ]\r(^un- 
tains.  no  Niagara,  no  very  grand  or  roman- 
tic scenery.  The  English  lakes  are  charm- 
ing in  their  quiet  way  ;  perhaps  the  quietest 
of  them,  such  as  Grasmere,  charm  more 
than  those  which,  by  their  bolder  scenery, 
make  higher  claims  on  our  admiration. 
The  mountain  district  of  North  Wales  well 
repays  a  visit  :  vSnowdon,  though  its  height 
is  not  Alpine,  is  in  form  a  genuine  moun- 
tain, and  the  road  from  Barmouth  to  Dol 


PHYSICAL    FEATURES.  79 

gelly,  under  Cader  Idris,  is  about  the  most 
beautiful  thing  in  the  island.  If  the  excur- 
sion is  extended  to  Scotland  when  the  pur- 
ple heather  is  in  bloom,  hills  and  lakes  will 
be  seen  which  in  brilliancy  of  colouring  at 
least  vie  with  any  lakes  and  hills  in  the 
world.  For  the  English  lakes  Wordsworth 
has  given  us  not  only  a  poetic  but  a  spiritual 
handbook,  while  we  see  the  Scotch  High- 
lands in  the  company  of  Walter  Scott,  who 
imparts  a  sense  of  enjoyment  as  fresh  as 
Highland  air.  Killarney  is  famed  above  all 
its  rivals,  Scotch  or  English,  and  almost  the 
whole  of  the  coast  of  Ireland  is  as  fine  as 
the  interior  is  unattractive.  The  island  has 
been  compared  to  an  ugly  picture  set  in  a 
beautiful  frame."  Beautiful  above  all  is  the 
western  coast  of  Ireland,  with  its  purple 
mountains  and  the  long  inlets,  into  which 
the  Atlantic  rolls.  The  coast  scenery  of 
Cornwall  and  Devonshire,  too,  is  very 
lovely,  while  its  interest  is  enhanced  by" 
quaint  old  villages,  such  as  Clovelly  and 
Polperro,  perched  on  rocky  eyries  or  nest- 
ling in  deep  '  'combes,  "with  which  are  linked 
memories  of  maritime  adventure,  of  daring 
warfare  with  the  Armada,  of  buccaneering 
forays  on  the  Spanish  Main,  or  of  the  hardly 
less  daring  though  less  honourable  feats  of 


So  A    TRir    TO    ENGLAND. 

the  smugglers  in  later  days.  From  those 
shores,  too,  sailed  the  adventurers  who  ex- 
plored the  New  World  and  linked  it  to  the 
Old.  The  rocky  amphitheatres  of  the  north- 
eastern coast  are  magnificent  when  the 
waves  of  the  German  ( )cean  climb  them  in 
a  storm.  But  the  characteristic  beauty  of 
England,  the  beauty  in  which  she  has  no 
rival,  is  of  a  kind  of  which  mention  is  fit- 
tingly made  after  a  description  of  her  rural 
society  and  life.  It  is  the  beauty  of  a  land 
which  combines  the  highest  cultivation  with 
sylvan  gi'eenness,  of  an  ancient  land  and  a 
land  of  lovely  hcmies.  The  eastern  coun- 
ties are  flat  and  tame.  But  elsewhere  the 
country  is  rolling,  and  from  every  rising 
ground  the  eye  ranges  over  a  landscape  of 
extraordinary  richness  and  extraordinary 
finish.  The  finish,  which  is  the  product  of 
immense  wealth  laid  out  on  a  small  area, 
is  perhaps  more  striking  than  anything  else 
to  the  stranger  who  comes  from  a  raw  land 
of  promise.  Trees  being  left  in  the  hedge- 
ro^Vs  as  well  as  in  the  parks  and  pleasure 
grounds  and  in  the  copses,  which  serve  as 
covers  for  game,  the  general  appearance 
is  that  of  woodland,  though  every  rood  of 
the  land  is  under  the  highest  tillage.  Gray 
church  towers,  hamlets,  mansions,  home- 


RURAL    ENGLAND.  51 

steads,  cottages,  showing  themselves  every- 
where, fill  the  landscape  with  human  in- 
terest. There  is  many  a  more  picturesque, 
there  is  no  lovelier  land,  than  Old  England, 
and  a  great  body  of  essentially  English 
poetry  from  Co^v^Der  to  Tennyson  attests  at 
once  the  unique  character  and  the  potency 
of  the  charm.  The  sweetest  season  is 
spring,  when  the  landscape  is  most  intensely 
gi'een,  when  the  May  is  in  bloom  in  all  the 
hedges,  and  the  air  is  full  of  its  fragi*ance, 
when  the  meadows  are  full  of  cowslips,  the 
banks  of  primroses  and  violets,  the  w^oods 
of  the  wild  hyacinth.  Then  you  feel  the 
joyous  spirit  that  breathes  through  certain 
idyllic  passages  of  Shakespeare.  To  appre- 
ciate English  scenery  a  carriage  tour  is 
indispensable,  for  the  railroads  do  not  fol- 
low the  lines  of  beauty.  After  seeing 
Stratford-on- Avon, Coventry,  and  Warwick, 
you  may  take  a  carriage  to  Banbury,  pass- 
ing by  Compton  Winyard,  one  of  the  most 
curious  of  the  ancient  manor  houses,  and 
make  your  way  to  Edgehill,  where  the  first 
encounter  took  place  between  Charles  and 
the  Parliamentary  Army,  and  where  a 
clump  of  trees  waves  over  the  gi'ave  of 
many  an  Englislunan  who  died  for  Eng- 
land's right.  The  way  leads  along  the 
r 


82  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

edge  of  the  great  central  plateau  of  England, 
from  which  you  look  dowTi  upon  as  rich  a 
champaif,Ti  as  a  painter  ever  drew.  From 
Banbury  you  may  take  the  train  to  Oxford 
and  Blenheim,  or  you  may  take  the  train 
to  Henley,  and  from  Henley  go  do-svn  the 
Thames  in  a  boat  to  Windsor.  The  tract 
of  river  scene  from  Henley  to  Maidenhead, 
just  above  Windsor,  is  about  the  best  in 
England,  and  the  view  of  Windsor  as  you 
approach  it  on  the  water  is  the  finest.  The 
landscape  on  which  you  look  down  from 
the  singular  ridge  of  Malvern  is  not  less  rich 
than  that  on  which  you  look  down  from 
Edgehill,  and  at  Malvern  you  have  the  view 
both  ways.  But  anywhere  in  the  rural 
districts,  except  in  the  eastern  counties,  you 
are  sure  of  finding  a  landscape  which  de- 
lights the  heart.  Look  on  the  picture  while 
you  may.  When  democratic  agrarianism 
shall  have  passed  its  equalizing  plough  over 
all  those  parks  and  groves,  there  may  be  an 
improvement  in  material  conditions,  but 
the  landscape  will  enchant  no  more. 

Her  perpetual  greenness  England  owes  to 
her  much  maligned  climate.  The  rain  falls 
not  in  a  three  days'  storm  or  a  water-spout, 
but  in  frequent  showers  throughout  the 
year.    On   the   Western  coast,  which  re- 


THE    ENGLISH    CLIMATE.  83 

ceives  the  clouds  from  the  Atlantic,  the 
climate  is  wet.  But  the  rainfall  elsewhere 
is  not  extraordinary.  England  is  in  the 
latitude  of  Labrador.  She  owes  the  com- 
parative mildness  of  her  climate  to  the 
Gulf  Stream  and  other  oceanic  influences, 
the  range  of  which  is  limited,  so  that  there 
are  in  fact  several  climates  in  the  island. 
In  the  south,  tender  evergreens  flourish  and 
the  fig  ripens.  In  the  southwest,  on  the 
coast  of  Devonshire  and  Cornwall  where 
the  Gulf  Stream  warms  the  air,  the  myrtle 
flourishes  and  flowers  are  seen  at  Christ- 
mas. In  the  North,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
winter  is  very  sharp,  and  the  Flora  is  much 
more  limited.  Americans,  who  cannot 
bear  to  think  that  there  is  anything  bad 
in  their  country  without  comforting  them- 
selves with  the  reflection  that  there  is  some- 
thing worse  in  England,  generally,  on  a 
disagreeable  day,  salute  you  with  the  re- 
mark, "This  is  something  like  English 
weather  !  "  They  can  show  no  weather 
finer  than  an  English  summer  evening 
drawn  out  into  a  long  twilight.  The  Lon- 
don fogs  are  hideous  and  dangerous,  but 
they  are  not  the  climate  of  England ;  they 
are  the  coal-smoke  of  five  millions  of 
people. 


84  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

From  the  praises  of  English  scenery  and 
of  the  outward  aspect  of  English  life  must 
be  emphatically  excepted  the  manufactur- 
ing districts.  Than  these,  perhaps,  earth 
hardly  holds  anything  less  attractive.  It 
is  easy  to  understand  that  to  the  soul  of 
the  Kuskinite  the  sight  must  be  torture, 
though  the  Ruskinite  wears  the  cloth,  uses 
the  hardware,  and,  when  he  travels,  is 
drawn  by  engines  and  over  rails  produced 
by  these  forges.  The  heart  of  the  hideous- 
ness  is  the  Black  Country  of  Staffordshire, 
round  AVolverhampton,  where  not  only  is 
the  scene  by  day  "black"  in  the  highest 
degree  and  in  every  sense  of  the  term,  but 
the  night  flares  with  dismal  fires,  while  the 
clank  of  the  forges  completes  the  resem- 
blance to  Pandemonium.  The  dark  realm 
extends  with  varying  shades  of  darkness 
over  a  great  part  of  the  North  Midland 
counties.  Once  these  were  pleasant  dales, 
down  which  coursed  bright  streams.  The 
streams,  in  fact,  by  the  water  power  which 
they  afforded,  first  drew  manufactures  to 
the  district.  Here  and  there  in  the  out- 
skirts of  a  manufacturing  town  an  old 
manor  house  will  still  be  found  standing  as 
a  witness  to  the  days  of  clear  skies,  fresh 
air,  and  untainted  waters.   AVhere,  in  those 


THE    MANUFACTURING    DISTRICTS.     85 

days,  tlie  hunter  ranged  and  the  falcon 
flew,  the  population  is  now  so  dense  that 
the  whole  district  seems  one  vast  city. 
Behold  the  greatest  marvels  which  earth 
has  to  show  in  the  way  of  machinery, 
mechanical  skill,  and  industrial  organiza- 
tion. Pay  the  homage  due  to  the  mighty 
power  of  production  and  gratefully  ac- 
knowledge the  vast  addition  which  it  has 
made  to  human  wealth  and  comfort.  Em- 
brace in  your  view  the  possibilities  of  a 
future  economy  of  labour,  such  as  may 
in  the  times  to  come  bring  the  toilers  in- 
crease of  leisure,  enjoyment  and  civilization. 
Judge  for  yourself  at  the  same  time  from 
the  aspect  of  the  people  and  their  habita- 
tions whether  a  great  extension  of  factory 
life  on  its  present  footing  is  an  unmixed 
blessing  to  a  nation,  and  whether  on  the 
whole  those  nations  are  npt  the  happiest 
for  which^  the  manufacturing  is  done  by 
others.  The  employment  of  women  in  fac- 
tories and  the  effect  of  this  upon  the  women 
themselves,  the  health  of  offspring,  and  the 
home  are  especially  worthy  of  attention.  , 
Whether  life  is  worth  living  is  a  question 
which  seems  likely  to  present  itself  with  no 
ordinary  force  to  one  who  toils  in  a  cotton 
mill  or  foundry,  and  dwells  in  one  of  those 


86  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

dismal  rows  of  dingy  cottages  beneath  a 
constant  pall  of  smoke.  The  ordinary 
workman  sees  at  all  events  the  completed 
work  of  his  own  hands  and  may  have  more 
or  less  of  satisfaction  in  its  completion.  If 
it  is  well  done  he  may  have  real  joy  in  its 
excellence.  A  factory  hand  sees  nothing 
but  that  particular  part  of  the  process  which 
forms  the  unvarying  work  of  his  own  day  ; 
he  is  little  more  than  a  human  hammer  or 
spindle,  and  ranks  not  with  the  artizan, 
much  less  with  the  artist,  but  with  the 
almost  automatic  machine.  He  may  well 
be  pardoned  if  his  tastes  are  not  high,  and 
if  he  indemnifies  himself  after  his  dull  toil 
by  spending  his  wages  in  animal  indulgence. 
The  scene  can  hardly  be  viewed  with  entire 
satisfaction  by  any  one  but  a  millionaire 
whose  wealth  is  advancing  by  leaps  and 
bounds.  The  separation  of  the  class  of 
employers  from  that  of  the  employed  is 
a  bad  feature  of  the  social  organization  of 
these  communities.  The  millionaire  no 
longer  lives  beside  his  mill  ;  naturally 
enough,  he  prefers  purer  air  ;  the  day's 
business  over,  he  drives  off  to  his  villa  in 
the  suburbs  and  his  hands  can  know  him 
only  as  a  master.  If  they  walk  out  into 
the  suburbs  on  a  Sunday  they  see  his  man- 


MANUFACTURING    TOWNS.  87 

sion,  tell  each  other  that  it  is  the  produce 
of  their  labour  of  which  they  have  been 
defrauded,  and  become  ripe  for  Socialism 
and  strikes.  A  noble  attempt  was  made 
by  the  late  Sir  Titus  Salt  to  organize  fac- 
tory life  on  a  happier  footing,  to  render  it 
brighter,  healthier,  cleaner,  and  to  place 
within  the  reach  of  the  people  the  means 
of  culture  and  enjoyment.  Saltaire,  near 
Bradford,  his  model  manufacturing  com- 
munity, is  well  worth  a  visit.  On  the 
whole,  the  benevolence  which  created  and 
sustains  it  seems  to  be  rewarded,  though 
here,  as  at  Pullman,  the  American  comiter- 
part  of  Saltaire,  there  are  difficulties  to 
contend  with  in  the  somewhat  stiff-necked 
independence  of  the  people,  by  w^hich  the 
patience  of  philanthropy  is  apt  to  be  sorely 
tried. 

In  the  time  of  Charles  I.  wdien  manufac- 
turers w^ere  only  in  the  germ,  and  when  feu- 
dal relations  and  sentiments  still  lingered 
in  the  north,  these  districts  were  the  spe- 
cial seat  of  Loyalism.  They  are  now  the 
special  seat  of  Radicalism.  National  senti- 
ment is  not  strong  among  the  factory  hands. 
They  think  more  of  the  Trade  Union  than 
of  the  country.  The  region  is  politically 
not  so  much  a  part  of  Old  England,  as  of 


88  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

the  world's  labour  market.  Whatever  in- 
fluence it  may  be  destmecl  to  exert  on  the 
future  development  of  humanity,  it  has 
little  connection  with  the  historic  gi-eatness 
of  the  nation.  The  chief  danger  to  the  great- 
ness of  the  nation  in  truth  arises  from  the  m- 
fluence  of  the  factory  hands  in  alliance  with 
other  ultra-democratic  and  unpatriotic  ele- 
ments of  the  electorate.  Municipal  spirit  is, 
however,  strong,  and  mmiicipal  organization 
is  carried  to  a  high  perfection.  Mr.  Joseph 
Chamberlain's  Birmingham  is  a  model 
municipality  in  its  way,  though  its  way  is 
rather  that  of  the  '•  authoritative  Kadical" 
than  that  of  Liberals  and  Keformers  of  the 
old  school  who  had  ''  liberty  and  property  " 
for  their  watchword. 

So  mucli  wealth  could  hardly  fail,  where 
there  was  any  feeling  for  beauty  or  local 
pride,  to  embody  itself  in  some  forms  of 
magnificence.  The  new  City  Hall  and  other 
public  buildings  in  the  great  manufacturing 
cities  of  the  North  of  England  vie  in  sump- 
tuousness  at  least  with  the  edifices  of  Ghent 
and  Antwerp,  though  the  atmosphere  laden 
with  smoke  is  a  cruel  drawback  to  archi- 
tectural beauty.  Nor  are  the  great  ware- 
houses of  Manchester,  which  is  the  chief 
centre  of  distribution,  without  an  austere 


THE    OLD    COACHING    DAYS.  89 

grandeur  of  their  own.  The  mansions  of 
the  chiefs  of  these  vast  armies  of  industry 
in  tlie  outskirts  of  the  cities  are  often  very 
handsome,  and  their  owners  are  not  seldom 
munificent  patrons  of  art.  Manchester  is 
famous  not  only  for  her  bales  but  for  Art 
Exhibitions. 

It  is  with  less  mixed  feelings  that  the 
visitor's  attention  is  called  to  the  wonders 
of  the  Liverj)ool  docks,  and  of  the  mercan- 
tile marine  of  England.  In  all  the  world  of 
labour  there  is  nothing  sounder,  stronger, 
braver  than  the  British  seaman.  It  is  to 
be  feared  that  few  lives  in  the  world  of 
labour  are  harder  than  is  his  upon  the  win- 
try seas.  He  is  the  very  sinew  of  the  coun- 
try, as  well  as  the  greatest  producer  of  its 
wealth,  and  his  qualities  are  a  main  source 
of  what  is  noblest  in  the  national  character. 
Unhappily,  while  all  the  factory  hands  vote, 
the  seaman  cannot  vote  ;  thus  the  least  na- 
tional and  patriotic  part  of  the  people  exer- 
cises its  full  influence  in  determining  the 
destinies  of  the  country,  while  the  most 
national  and  patriotic  exercises  no  influence 
at  all. 


>^ 


Fancy   mail  coaches  still  run.     But  the 
genuine  mail  coach  lives  now  only  in  old 


90  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

prints,  or  in  those  pen-pictures  of  Dickens, 
which  are  the  most  admirable  descriptions 
of  everything  that  met  the  eyes  of  Sam 
"Weller  fifty  years  ago,  while  in  their  con- 
trast with  what  now  exists  they  mark  the 
rapidity  of  change,  for  the  subjects  of  some 
of  tliem  belong  as  completely  to  the  past  as 
the  coats  and  cravats  of  the  Regency.  The 
outside  of  a  mail  coach  was  pleasant  enough 
on  a  fine  day  ;  it  was  not  so  pleasant  in 
rain,  with  the  umbrella  of  the  passenger  on 
the  seat  behind  you  dripping  down  your 
back,  or  when  you  had  to  sit  upright  all 
night  afraid  of  sleeping  lest  you  should  fall 
oft".  Moreover,  you  were  very  liable  to  be 
upset,  in  which  case,  as  the  luggage  piled 
on  the  coach  top  was  apt  to  fall  upon  you, 
the  carnage  among  the  outsiders  was  often 
considerable.  The  British  railroad,  like 
everj^thing  else  in  England,  is  finished  to 
perfection,  and  on  such  a  line  as  the  Great 
"Western,  which  bespeaks  the  lavish  genius 
of  Brunei,  you  travel  at  the  greatest  attain- 
able speed  with  the  most  perfect  safety. 
The  service  is  altogether  excellent,  and 
democracy  has  not  yet  found  its  way  into 
the  manners  of  the  guards  and  porters.  As 
a  set-off  there  is  a  good  deal  of  feeing.  In 
England  generally  indeed,  you  are  too  often 


RAILWAY   TRAVEL.  9I 

called  upon  to  gTease  the  wheels  of  life  in 
this  way.  The  Canadian  or  American  will 
remark  differences  between  the  English 
railway  fashions  and  ours.  The  carriages, 
instead  of  being  long  and  undivided,  so  as 
to  seat  fifty  or  sixty  people,  are  divided 
into  bodies,  the  bodies  in  the  fu"st-class  seat- 
ing only  six  or  eight,  and  those  which  seat 
eight  being  sometimes  divided  again  into  two 
compartments.  The  arrangement  of  the 
carriages  may  be  in  part  a  survival  of  the 
structure  of  the  mail  coach,  but  it  has  prob- 
ably been  also  in  part  determined  by  the 
structure  of  society.  Aristocracy  delights 
in  privacy  and  seclusion.  "You  would 
bring  down  a  gentleman,"  was  the  answer 
of  one  of  that  class,  when  asked  to  come 
into  public  life,  "to  the  level  of  a  king  or 
a  gi'ocer."  Among  the  gentry  of  former 
days  it  was  against  caste  to  travel  in  a  pub- 
lic conveyance.  Antipathy  to  such  \adgari- 
zation  entered  largely  into  the  hatred  of 
railroads,  expressed  by  that  comic  trouba- 
dour of  aristocracy,  Theodore  Hook.  There 
were  persons  of  quality  who  lived  far  into 
the  railroad  days,  yet  never  entered  a  rail- 
way carriage ;  they  persisted  in  posting 
laboriously  in  their  own  carriages  along  the 
line  of  a  railway.     At  first  the  fashion  was 


92  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

to  have  your  own  carriage  strapped  on  a 
truck  behind  tlie  train  ;  a  process  which  re- 
quired you  to  be  at  the  station  an  liour  be- 
fore the  train  started,  while  if  the  strapping 
was  not  tight,  the  consequence  was  a  mo- 
tion of  tlie  carriage  which  made  you  sick. 
A  body  or  a  compartment  which  you  can 
engage  for  your  own  party  is  the  last  rem- 
nant of  the  cherished  privacy.  The  absence 
of  the  system  of  checking  baggage  is  to  be 
accounted  for  partly  by  the  multiplicity  of 
branch  lines,  which  would  make  the  pro- 
cess very  difficult ;  but  another  cause  prob- 
ably is  that  members  of  the  governing 
class  travel  with  valets  and  maids  who  save 
them  the  trouble  of  looking  after  their  bag- 
gage. Looking  after  baggage  on  an  Eng- 
lish railway  is  no  inconsiderable  item  in 
those  cares  of  travelling,  which,  when  rec- 
reation for  the  weary  brain  is  sought  not 
in  rest  but  in  locomotion,  sometimes  worry 
almost  as  much  as  the  cares  of  business. 
Your  baggage  is  labelled  with  your  desti- 
nation. On  some  lines  it  is  also  labelled 
with  the  initial  letter  of  your  name,  and  on 
arrival  at  a  terminus  the  pieces  are  dis- 
tributed according  to  the  letters,  whence  it 
came  to  pass  that  an  ecclesiastical  digni- 
tary, whose  name  began   with  L,   had   to 


/ 


RAILWAY   TRAVEL.  93 

lodge  a  complaint  before  the  Board  against 
a  porter,  who  when  he  asked  for  his  bag- 
gage had  told  him  to  go  to  "  Hell  ! ' ' 
There  are  sleej^ing  cars  on  one  or  two  of 
the  longest  trunk  lines  ;  but  in  general  there 
is  no  need  of  sleeping  cars.  The  wealth  and 
power  of  England  lie  in  a  very  small  com- 
pass. We  have  all  heard  of  the  American 
who  when  sojourning  in  the  Island  ab- 
stained from  going  out  at  night  "  for  fear 
of  falling  off."  ''This  is  a  great  country, 
sir,"  cannot  be  said  by  an  Englishman, 
whatever  his  pride  may  whisper  about  the 
greatness  of  his  nation. 

With  the  mail  coach  and  the  posting 
system  has  departed  the  Old  English  Inn, 
wherein  a  traveller  in  Johnson's  time  took 
his  pleasure,  and  the  comforts  of  which 
occupy  a  prominent  place  in  the  philosophy 
of  life  according  to  Dickens.  About  your 
only  chance  of  enjoying  the  happiness, 
which  consists  in  being  welcomed  after  a 
cold  journey  by  a  smiling  landlady  and 
warming  your  slippered  feet  before  a  bright 
fire  in  a  cosy  private  room,  while  your 
neatly  dressed  dinner  is  being  set  upon  the 
table,  depends  upon  your  lighting  upon  one 
of  those  country  inns  to  which  sportsmen 
still  resort  for  the  hunting  or  fishing  season. 


94  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

Hotels  in  the  great  cities  of  England  are 
not  what  they  are  in  the  United  States, 
where  genius  is  devoted  to  hotel-keeping 
which  might  make  a  great  statesman  or 
general.  People  in  England  do  not  board 
in  hotels.  That  undomestic  habit  is  largely 
a  consequence  of  the  servant  difficulty, 
which,  in  lands  where  no  one  likes  to  call 
anybody  master  or  mistress,  often  makes 
housekeeping  purgatorial.  In  England  as 
well  as  here  the  difficulty  exists,  but  not  in 
so  desperate  a  form.  The  old-fashioned 
English  household,  consisting  of  servants 
who  attached  themselves  to  the  family  for 
life,  identified  themselves  with  its  interests, 
and  felt  a  pride  in  its  consequence,  is  now 
a  memory  of  the  past,  or  lingers  as  a  reality 
only  in  some  very  sequestered  country 
house  with  a  very  good  master  and  mistress 
of  the  old  school.  Servants  are  educated  ; 
they  write  letters  and  correspond  with  the 
world  without,  which  in  more  primitive 
days  they  did  not,  and  they  share  the  gen- 
eral restlessness  by  which  society  is  per- 
vaded. Moreover,  the  migratory  habits  of 
the  employers  render  the  maintenance  of 
settled  households  very  difficult,  and  there- 
fore preclude  strong  attachment's.  But  the 
democratic  idea,  which  is  the  chief  source 


THE    RAILWAY    SYSTEM.  95 

of  the  trouble,  and  seems  likely  even  to 
prove  fatal  in  the  end  to  the  relation  alto- 
gether, has  not  yet  thoroughly  penetrated 
the  English  kitchen  and  servants'  hall. 
There  is  not  the  same  strong  preference  for 
the  "  independence "  of  factory  life,  nor 
are  things  come  to  such  a  pass  that  your 
cook  takes  herself  off  without  notice,  per- 
haps on  the  morning  of  a  dinner-party,  and 
leaves  you  to  get  your  dinner  cooked  as  you 
may. 

Among  the  marvels  of  England  may  cer- 
tainly be  counted  the  vastness  and  com- 
plexity of  the  railway  system,  which  will 
be  impressed  upon  your  mind  by  standing 
on  the  platform,  say  at  Clapham  Junction, 
and  watching  the  multiplicity  of  trains 
rushing  in  different  directions.  Withal, 
the  punctuality,  regularity,  and  freedom 
from  accidents  are  wonderful  ;  and  they 
depend,  be  it  remembered,  on  the  strict  and 
faithful  performance  of  duty  by  every  man 
among  many  thousands,  not  taken  from  the 
class  in  which  the  sense  of  honour  is  sup- 
posed to  have  its  peculiar  seat,  who  are  tried 
by  exposure  to  the  roughest  weather,  and 
to  all  the  temptations  of  intemperance 
which  arise  from  fatigue  and  cold  com- 
bined.    A  moment  of  inattention  on  the 


96  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

part  of  a  wearj^  pointsman  or  an  extra  glass 
of  grog  taken  on  a  bitter  winter's  night 
would  be  followed  by  wreck  and  massacre. 
Carlyle,  spinning  along  in  perfect  safety  at 
the  rate  of  forty  or  even  sixty  miles  an 
hour,  among  all  those  intersecting  roads 
and  through  numberless  possibilities  of  col- 
lision, might  surely  have  inferred,  if  the 
mind  of  the  arch-cynic  had  been  open  to  a 
genial  inference,  that  the  Present  was  not 
so  much  more  anarchical  than  the  Past  as 
the  author  of  Past  and  Present  had  a.ssumed. 
In  the  railway  army,  at  all  events,  a  disci- 
pline prevails  not  inferior  to  that  which 
prevailed  in  the  army  of  Frederick,  while 
the  railway  army  is  not  recruited  by  crimp- 
ing or  held  to  its  duty  by  the  lash.  There 
is  anarchy  now,  no  doubt,  and  there  is 
roguery  in  trade  and  industry ;  but  there 
was  at  least  as  much  of  both  in  the  days  of 
Abbot  Sampson,  as  Abbot  Sampson's  own 
history  proved. 

To  turn  to  London.  The  huge  city  per- 
haps never  impressed  the  imagination  more 
than  when  approaching  it  by  night  on  the 
top  of  a  coach  you  saw  its  numberless  lights 
flaring,  as  Tennyson  says,  "like  a  dreary 
dawn,"     The  most  impressive  approach  is 


THE    METROPOLIS.  97 

now  by  the  river  through  the  infinitude  of 
docks,  quays,  and  shipping.  London  is  not 
a  city,  but  a  province  of  brick  and  stone. 
Hardly  even  from  the  top  of  St.  Paul's  or 
of  the  Monument  can  anything  like  a  view 
of  the  city  as  a  whole  be  obtained.  It  is  in- 
dispensable, however,  to  make  one  or  the 
other  of  those  ascents  w'hen  a  clear  day  can 
be  found,  not  so  much  because  the  view  is 
fine,  as  because  you  will  get  a  sensation  of 
vastness  and  multitude  not  easily  to  be  for- 
gotten. There  is,  or  was  not  long  ago,  a 
point  on  the  ridge  that  connects  Hampstead 
with  Highgate  from  which,  as  you  looked 
over  London  to  the  Surrey  Hills  beyond,  the 
modern  Babylon  presented  something  like 
the  aspect  of  a  city.  The  ancient  Babylon 
may  have  vied  with  London  in  circum- 
ference, but  the  greater  part  of  its  area 
was  occupied  by  open  spaces ;  the  modern 
Babylon  is  a  dense  mass  of  humanity.  Lon- 
don with  its  suburbs  has  five  millions  of 
inhabitants,  and  still  it  grows.  It  grows 
through  the  passion  which  seems  to  be  seiz- 
ing mankind  everywhere,  on  this  continent 
as  well  as  in  Europe,  for  emigration  from 
the  country  into  the  tow'n,  not  only  as  the 
centre  of  wealth  and  employment,  but  as  the 
centre    of  excitement,  and,  as  the  people 

G 


98  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

fondly  fancy,  of  enjoyment.  It  grows  also 
by  immigration  from  other  countries  ;  the 
immigration  of  Germans  is  large  enough  to 
oust  the  natives  from  many  employments, 
especially  clerkships,  and  is  breeding  jeal- 
ousy on  that  account.  "Worst  of  all,  London 
is  said  within  a  recent  period  to  have  re- 
ceived many  thousand  Polish  Jews.  What 
municipal  government  can  be  expected  to 
contend  successfully  against  such  an  influx, 
added  to  all  the  distress  and  evils  with 
which  every  great  capital  in  itself  abounds? 
The  Empire  and  the  commercial  relations 
of  England  draw  representatives  of  trading 
communities  or  subject  races  from  all  parts 
of  the  globe,  and  the  faces  and  costumes  of 
the  Hindoo,  the  Parsi,  the  Lascar,  and  the 
ubiquitous  Chinaman,  mingle  in  the  motley 
crowd  with  the  merchants  of  Europe  and 
America.  The  streets  of  London  are,  in 
this  respect,  to  the  modern  what  the  great 
Place  of  Tyre  must  have  been  to  the  ancient 
world.  But  pile  Carthage  on  Tyre,  Venice 
on  Carthage,  Amsterdam  on  Venice,  and 
you  will  not  make  the  equal,  or  anything 
near  the  equal,  of  London.  Here  is  the  great 
mart  of  the  world,  to  which  the  best  and 
richest  products  are  brought  from  every 
land  and  clime,  so  that  if    you  have  put 


LONDON    A    HUMAN    HIVE.  99 

money  in  your  purse  you  may  command 
every  object  of  utility  or  fancy  which  grows 
or  is  made  anywhere  without  going  beyond 
the  circuit  of  the  great  cosmopolitan  city. 
Parisian,  German,  Eussian,  Hindoo,  Japan- 
ese, Chinese  industry  is  as  much  at  your  ser- 
vice here,  if  you  have  the  all-compelling  talis- 
man in  your  pocket,  as  in  Paris,  Berlin,  St. 
Petersburg,  Benares,  Yokohama,  or  Pekin. 
That  London  is  the  great  distributing  centre 
of  the  world  is  shown  by  the  fleets  of  the 
carrying-trade  of  which  the  countless  masts 
rise  along  her  wharves  and  in  her  docks. 
She  is  also  the  bank  of  the  world.  But  we 
are  reminded  of  the  vicissitudes  of  com- 
merce and  the  precarious  tenure  by  which 
its  empire  is  held  when  we  consider  that 
the  bank  of  the  world  in  the  middle  of 
the  last  century  was  Amsterdam. 

The  first  and  perhaps  the  greatest  marvel 
of  London  is  the  commissariat.  How  can 
the  five  millions  be  regularly  supplied  with 
food,  and  everything  needful  to  life,  even 
with  such  things  as  milk  and  those  kinds  of 
fruit  which  can  hardly  be  left  bej^ond  a 
day  ?  Here  again  we  see  reason  for  except- 
ing to  the  sweeping  jeremiads  of  cynicism, 
and  concluding  that  though  there  may  be 
fraud  and  scamping  in  the  industrial  world, 


lOO  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

genuine  production,  faithful  service,  disci- 
plined energ}-,  and  skill  in  organization 
cannot  wholly  have  departed  from  the 
earth.  London  is  not  only  well  fed,  but 
well  supplied  with  water  and  well  drained. 
Vast  and  densely  peopled  as  it  is,  it  is  a 
healthy  city.  Yet  the  limit  of  practicable 
extension  seems  to  be  nearly  reached.  It 
becomes  a  question  how  the  increasing 
multitude  shall  be  supplied  not  only  with 
food  and  water  but  with  air. 

There  is  something  very  impressive  in  the 
roar  of  the  vast  city.  It  is  a  sound  of  a 
Niagara  of  human  life.  It  ceases  not  except 
during  the  hour  or  two  before  da^^^l,  when 
the  last  carriages  have  rolled  away  from  the 
balls  and  the  market  carts  have  hardly  be- 
gun to  come  in.  Only  in  returning  from  a 
very  late  ball  is  the  visitor  likely  to  have  a 
chance  of  seeing  what  Wordsworth  saw 
from  Westminster  Bridge : 

Earth  has  not  anything  to  show  more  fair ; 
Dull  would  he  be  of  soul  who  could  pass  by 
A  sight  so  touchin,<;  in  its  majesty ; 
This  City  now  doth,  like  a  garment,  wear 
The  beauty  of  the  morning;  silent,  bare, 
Ships,  towers,  domes,  theatres,  and  temples  lie 
Open  unto  the  tields,  and  to  the  sky ; 
All  bright  and  glittering  in  the  open  air. 


LONDON    MISERY.  lOI 

Never  did  sun  more  beautifully  steep 
lu  his  first  splendour,  valley,  rock,  or  hill ; 
Xe'er  saw  I,  never  felt,  a  calm  so  deep  ! 
The  river  glideth  at  his  own  sweet  will : 
Dear  God  !  the  very  houses  seem  asleep ; 
And  all  that  mighty  heart  is  lying  still ! 

Everybody  has  something  to  say  about 
the  painful  contrast  between  the  extremes 
of  wealth  and  poverty  in  London,  and  the 
people  from  new  countries,  where  the  press- 
ure on  the  means  of  subsistence  is  as  yet 
comparatively  little  felt,  are  very  apt  to  turn 
up  their  hands  and  eyes  and  thank  heaven 
that  they  are  not  as  those  English.  Painful 
the  contrast  is,  and  hideous  some  of  the  low 
quarters  of  London  are,  above  all  at  night, 
when  the  fatal  gin-palaces  flare,  and  round 
them  gather  sickly  and  ragged  forms  com- 
ing to  barter  perhaps  the  last  garment  or  the 
bread  of  to-morrow^  for  an  hour  of  excite- 
ment or  oblivion.  But  in  the  first  place  we 
must  remember  that  pictures  of  London 
misery  have  been  sought  out  and  presented 
in  the  most  glaring  colours  for  the  purposes 
of  literary  sensation.  In  the  second  place 
we  must  remember  that  among  five  millions 
there  is  inevitably  much  distress,  caused 
not  only  by  w'ant,  but  by  disease,  intemper- 
ance, crime,  and  accidents,  for  which  the 


I02  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

community  is  not  to  blame.  In  the  third 
place  we  must  remember  the  gjeat  immi- 
gration of  needy,  or  woree  than  needy,  for- 
eigners already  mentioned.  Charity,  we 
find  on  inquiry,  is  active;  often  in  those 
crowded  and  noisome  alleys  we  shall  meet 
its  gentle  ministers,  and  we  shall  be  told 
that  they  pass  safely  on  their  mission  even 
through  the  worst  haunts  of  crime.  Xor 
does  the  number  of  the  destitute  and  suffer- 
ing after  all  bear  any  proportion  to  the 
number  of  those  for  whom  the  great  city 
provides  a  livelihood,  and  who  are  living  in 
decency  and  comfort,  with  all  the  opportu- 
nities of  domestic  happiness  and  the  appli- 
ances of  the  most  advanced  civilization. 
The  misery  of  London  is  more  repulsive 
than  that  of  some  other  cities  in  its  aspect, 
partly  on  account  of  the  dinginess  produced 
by  the  smoke,  partly  because  it  is  crowded 
into  such  close  quarters.  The  streets  being, 
like  those  of  ancient  cities  generally,  too 
narrow  and  crooked  for  street  railways, 
the  people  are  compelled  to  live  close  to 
the  centres  of  employment,  especially  to  the 
docks.  Still,  when  all  allowances  have 
been  made,  the  bad  quarters  of  London  are 
a  sad  sight,  and  one  which  it  may  be  morally 
useful  to  Dives  amidst  his  purple  and  fine 


THE    CENTRE    OF    COMMERCE.        IO3 

linen  to  have  seen.  They  are  sources  of 
social  and  political  danger  too,  as  recent 
outbreaks  of  their  squalid  turbulence  have 
proved.  They  are  the  English  Faubourg 
St.  Antoine. 

The  East  of  London,  which  is  the  old 
city,  is,  as  all  know,  the  business  quar- 
ter. Let  the  worshipper  of  Mammon  when 
he  sets  foot  in  Lombard  Street  adore  his 
divinity,  of  all  whose  temples  this  is  the 
richest  and  the  most  famous.  Note  the 
throng  incessantly  threading  those  narrow 
and  tortuous  streets.  Nowhere  are  the 
faces  so  eager  or  the  steps  so  hurried,  ex- 
cept perhaps  in  the  business  quarter  of  New 
York.  Commerce  has  still  its  centre  here  ; 
but  the  old  social  and  civic  life  of  the  city 
has  fled.  What  once  were  the  dwellings  of 
the  merchants  of  London  are  now  vast  col- 
lections of  offices.  The  merchants  dwell 
in  the  mansions  of  the  West  End,  their 
clerks  in  villas  and  boxes  without  number, 
to  which  when  their  offices  close  they  are 
taken  by  the  suburban  railways.  On  Sun- 
day a  more  than  Sabbath  stillness  reigns  in 
those  streets,  while  in  the  churches,  the 
monuments  of  Wren's  architectural  genius, 
which  m  Wren's  day  were  so  crowded,  the 
clergyman  sleepily  performs  the  service  to 


104  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

a  congregation  wliicli  you  may  count  upon 
your  lingers.  It  is  worth  while  to  visit  the 
city  on  a  Sunday.  Here  and  there,  in  a 
back  .street,  may  still  be  seen  what  was  once 
the  mansion  of  a  merchant  prince,  ample 
and  stately,  with  the  rooms  which  in  former 
days  displayed  the  pride  of  commercial 
wealth  and  resounded  with  the  festivities  of 
the  olden  time  ;  now  the  sound  of  the  pen 
alone  is  heard.  These  and  other  relics  of 
former  days  are  fast  disappearing  before 
the  march  of  improvement,  which  is  driving 
straight  new  streets  through  the  antique 
labyrinth.  Some  of  the  old  thoroughfares 
as  well  as  the  old  names  remain.  There  is 
Cheapside,  along  which  through  the  change- 
ful ages,  so  varied  a  procession  of  hi.story 
has  swept.  There  is  Fleet  Street,  close  to 
which,  in  liolt  Court,  Johnson  lived,  and 
which  he  preferred  or  affected  to  prefer  to 
the  finest  scenes  of  nature.  Temple  Bar, 
once  grimly  garnished  with  the  heads  of 
traitors,  has  been  "numliered  with  the  things 
of  the  past,  after  furnishing  Mr.  Bright  by 
the  manner  in  which  the  omnibuses  were 
jammed  in  it,  with  a  vivid  simile  for  a  Leg- 
islative deadlock. 

In  days  of  old  when  the  city  was  not 
only  the  capital  of  commerce  and  the  cen- 


THE    LORD   MAYOR.  I05 

tre  of  commercial  life,  but  a  gxeat  political 
and  even  a  gi'eat  military  power  —  when 
not  only  did  kings  and  party  chiefs  look  to 
it  for  the  sinews  of  w^ar,  but  its  trainbands 
were  able  to  hold  their  own  in  the  field  of 
New^bury  against  Rupert's  Cavaliers  —  the 
Lord  Mayor  was  one  of  the  most  important 
personages  in  the  realm.  Foreigners,  and 
notably  the  French,  persist  in  fancying  that 
he  is  one  of  the  most  important  personages 
of  the  realm  still,  and  an  ex-Lord  Mayor 
showed  himself  well-informed  as  to  French 
opinion,  though  not  so  well  Instructed  in 
the  French  language,  wdien  travelling  in 
France  he  inscribed  on  his  card  ^\feu  Lord 
3Iaijor  de  Londres.''''  But  now  the  curious 
pageant,  resembling  that  of  an  exaggerated 
circus,  w'hich  on  the  9th  of  November  wends 
itsw^ay  from  the  City  to  "Westminster  at  the 
installation  of  a  new  Lord  Mayor,  is  an 
apt  emblem  of  the  state  of  an  office  which 
struggles  to  keep  up  its  outward  splendour 
wdien  its  intrinsic  grandeur  has  passed  away. 
The  Lord  Mayor  represents  the  city's  majes- 
ty and  provides  its  turtle  ;  he  is  the  official 
patron  of  benevolent  movements  and  char- 
ities, he  is  still  treated  by  Royalty  with  for- 
mal consideration,  and  receives  a  special  com- 
munication when  a  Prince  or  Princess  is  born. 


I06  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

But  the  power  which  city  kings,  like  Gresham 
or  Whittington,  wielded  has  passed  away, 
and  the  genuine  dignity  with  the  power. 
The  great  chiefs  of  commerce  do  not  take 
the  office,  which  in  truth  has  contracted  a 
certain  comic  tinge.  The  essential  qualifi- 
cations of  its  holder  are  ability  and  willing- 
ness to  spend  money  freely  in  the  hospital- 
ities of  which  the  Mansion  House,  once  the 
home  of  serious  counsels,  is  now  the  pro- 
verbial scene,  and  which  are  generally  said 
to  be  more  lavish  and  sumptuous  than  in- 
tellectual. To  borrow  a  phrase  from  Tom 
Moore,  ''he  who  dines  at  the  Mansion 
House  dines  where  more  good  things  are 
eaten  than  said,"  He  goes  to  "feed,"  in 
the  most  literal  sense  of  the  term,  on  turtle 
and  champagne.  "  Oh,  Sir,  I  am  so  hun- 
gry," said  a  beggar  to  an  Alderman,  who 
was  on  his  way  to  a  Lord  Maj'or's  feast. 
"  Lucky  dog,  I  wish  /  were,"  was  the  re- 
ply. Perhaps  the  most  important  remnant 
of  former  greatness  is  the  customary  pres- 
ence at  the  Lord  Mayor's  inaugural  bancpet 
of  the  Prime  Minister,  who  is  expected  to 
take  that  opportunity  of  delivering  himself 
to  the  nation  on  public  affairs.  The  Prime 
Minister,  being  the  real  king,  this  may  be 
said  to  be  the  real  king's  speech,  though 


THE    CITY   GUILDS.  10/ 

like  the  constitutional  performance  of  the 
same  kind  it  is  naturally  apt  to  be  buck- 
ram. 

A  sumptuous  relic  of  the  gi-eat  commer- 
cial city  of  the  Middle  Ages  are  the  city 
companies,  with  their  great  estates  and 
their  splendid  banqueting  hall.  The  halls 
of  the  Goldsmiths,  the  Merchant  Tailors, 
and  the  Fishmongers'  Guilds  will  repay  a 
visit.  Of  the  ancient  functions  of  these 
companies  little  of  course  remains.  They 
are  now  mercantile  and  social  fraternities, 
wath  the  dignity  of  antiquity,  and  such  in- 
fluences as  belong  to  any  gi-eat  corporation 
exercising  a  splendid  hospitality  and  mak- 
ing a  benevolent  use  of  part  at  least  of  their 
wealth  in  the  maintenance  of  schools  and 
charities.  Some  of  them  have  assumed  a 
political  tinge,  the  Goldsmiths  being  Tory 
and  the  Fishmongers  Whig.  The  axe  of 
reform  has  for  some  time  been  laid  at  the 
foot  of  this  tree  ;  but  the  tree  still  stands 
and  excellent  repasts  are  spread  under  its 
shade. 

Society  has  migrated  to  the  Westward, 
leaving  far  behind  the  ancient  abodes  of 
aristocracy,  the  Strand,  where  once  stood  a 
long  line  of  patrician  dwellings,  Great 
Queen   Street,  where   Shaftesbury's  house 


Io8  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

may  still  be  seen,  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields, 
where,  in  the  time  of  George  II.,  the  Duke 
of  Newcastle  held  his  levee  of  office-seekers, 
and  Russell  Square,  now  reduced  to  a  sort 
of  dowager  gentility.  Hereditary  mansions 
too  ancient  and  magnificent  to  be  deserted, 
such  as  Norfolk  House,  Spencer  House,  and 
Lansdowne  House,  stayed  the  westward 
course  of  aristocracy  at  St.  James's  Square 
and  Street,  Piccadilly,  and  Mayfair  ;  but 
the  general  tide  of  fashion  has  swept  far 
beyond.  In  that  vast  realm  of  wealth  and 
pleasure,  the  AVest  End  of  London,  the  eye 
is  not  satisfied  with  seeing,  neither  the  ear 
with  hearing.  There  is  not,  nor  has  there 
ever  been,  anything  like  it  in  the  world. 
Notes  of  admiration  might  be  accumulated 
to  any  extent  without  enhancing  the  im- 
pression. In  every  direction  the  visitor 
may  walk  till  he  is  weary  through  streets 
and  squares  of  houses,  all  evidently  the 
abodes  of  wealth,  some  of  them  veritable 
palaces.  The  parks  are  thronged,  the 
streets  are  blocked  with  handsome  equi- 
pages, filled  with  the  rich  and  gay.  Shops 
blaze  with  costly  wares,  and  abound  with 
everything  that  can  minister  to  luxury. 
On  a  fine  bright  day  of  May  or  early  June, 
and  days  of  May  or  early  June  are  often  as 


THE  PARKS  AND  THE  WEST  END.       IO9 

bright  in  London  as  anywhere,  the  Park  is 
probably  the  greatest  display  of  wealth  and 
of  the  pride  of  wealth  in  the  world.  The 
contrast  with  the  slums  of  the  East  End  no 
doubt  is  striking,  and  we  cannot  wonder  if 
the  soul  of  the  East  End  is  sometimes  filled 
with  bitterness  at  the  sight.  A  social  Jere- 
miah might  be  moved  to  holy  wrath  by  the 
glittering  scene.  The  seer,  however,  might 
be  reminded  that  not  all  the  owners  of  those 
carriages  are  the  children  of  idleness,  living 
by  the  sweat  of  another  man's  brow  ;  many 
of  them  are  professional  men  or  chiefs  of  in- 
dustry, working  as  hard  with  their  brains 
as  any  mechanic  works  with  his  hands,  and 
indispensable  ministers  of  the  highest  civili- 
zation. The  number  and  splendour  of  the 
equipages  are  thought  to  have  been  some- 
what diminished  of  late  by  the  reduction 
of  rents.  The  architecture  of  the  West 
End  of  London  is  for  the  most  part  drearily 
monotonous :  its  forms  have  too  plainly 
been  determined  by  the  builder,  not  by  the 
artist,  though  since  the  restoration  of  art, 
varieties  of  style  have  been  introduced  and 
individual  beauty  has  been  more  cultivated. 
It  is  the  boundless  expanse  of  opulence, 
street  after  street,  square  after  s(i«are,  that 
most  impresses  the  beholder,  and   makes 


no  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

him  wonder  from  what  miraculous  horn  of 
plenty  such  a  tide  of  riches  can  have  been 
poured. 

A  notable  feature  of  London  life  are  the 
Clubs,  which  form  a  line  of  palaces  along 
Pall  Mall.  On  this  side  of  the  water  we 
have  Clubs,  but  club-life  has  not  reached 
anytliiug  like  the  same  point  of  develop- 
ment. Marriage  in  the  Old  Country  is 
later  than  it  is  here,  the  avenues  of  the 
professions  being  more  crowded,  and  to 
board  in  hotels  is  not  the  fashion.  Young 
men  take  lodgings  and  board  in  their  Club. 
In  the  Club  they  have  every  possible  luxury, 
physical  and  intellectual,  provided  for  them 
at  the  cheapest  rate,  and  they  command  an 
establishment  such  as  a  millionaire  could 
scarcely  afford  to  keep.  Yet  few  of  the 
number  would  prefer  to  live  on  at  the  Club 
when  they  could  afford  to  exchange  it  even 
for  the  least  luxurious  home.  Better,  most 
of  them  would  say,  is  cold  mutton  and 
domestic  cheerfulness  therewith  than  soup, 
fish,  and  entrees,  followed  by  a  lonely 
evenmg.  The  Club,  commonly  speaking, 
has  ceased  to  be  social,  nor  is  common 
membership  an  mtroduction,  so  that  the 
inmate  oU  a  Club  may  sit  lonely  in  a  full 
room.      There  is,  of   course,  more  fellow- 


CLUBS    AND    CLUB    LIFE.  Ill 

ship  iu  the  Clubs  with  special  objects, 
which  form  a  tie  among  the  members  :  iu 
political  Clubs,  such  as  the  Carlton  and 
the  Reform  and  Brooke's  ;  in  professional 
Clubs,  such  as  the  United  Service,  or  in 
Clubs  of  particular  circles,  such  as  the 
Travellers'  and  the  Garrick.  To  enter 
some  of  the  select  Clubs  is  to  go  socially 
through  the  eye  of  a  needle.  At  the  head 
of  the  list  may  be  placed  the  Athenaeum, 
in  its  origin  literary  and  scientific,  as  the 
name  denotes,  but  now  general,  though 
still  with  an  intellectual  cast.  In  its  home, 
on  Waterloo  Place,  men  of  distinction  in 
all  lines  meet  in  the  hours  between  the 
closing  of  the  offices  and  dinner.  Entrance 
is  difficult,  and  the  candidate  has  to  wait 
many  years  before  his  name  comes  on  for 
ballot. 

The  outside  of  London  Society  may  be 
seen  on  a  fine  day  in  the  Park ;  it  may  be 
seen  in  full  dress  at  the  opera ;  especially  if 
Royalty  happens  to  be  there ;  it  may  be 
seen  in  Court  dress,  rolling  along  the  ave- 
nues to  Buckingham  Palace  on  the  afternoon 
of  a  drawing-room,  w^lien  the  curious  may 
also  enjoy  a  view  of  the  British  family 
chariot,  with  hammercloth,  fat  coachman 
in  wig  and  bouquet,  and  liveried  flunkeys 


112  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

with  stuffed  calves  and  gold-headed  canes 
behind.  Of  the  inside  a  glimpse  of  London 
Society  can  be  obtained  by  the  stranger 
only  through  the  novel.  Socially,  as  well 
as  commercially,  London  is  unlike  other 
capitals  in  being  the  centre  of  everything  at 
once.  Politics,  commerce,  law,  literature, 
science,  and  art,  all  are  gathered  there. 
This  lends  to  conversation  at  once  a  variety 
and  a  solid  interest  which,  in  a  mere  politi- 
cal city,  hi  a  mere  commercial  city,  or  in  a 
mere  pleasure  city,  it  would  not  possess. 
There  is  no  formality  or  stiffness  in  London 
Society ;  no  society  in  truth  can  be  more  free, 
or  even  more  hearty  during  the  hours  of 
intercourse.  "What  is  necessarily  wanting, 
when  the  circle  is  so  immense,  is  intimacy, 
the  charm  of  life  ;  for  no  mere  acquaintance, 
however  brilliant,  can  be  so  interesting  as 
those  whom  you  know  well.  Intimacy  is 
possible  only  in  smaller  circles,  which  those 
who  have  lived  regularly  in  London  may 
form.  Where  there  are  such  numbers  to 
be  entertained  there  cannot  fail  to  be  a 
good  deal  of  the  mere  social  battue  ;  there 
are  great  dinner  parties  at  which  you  have 
no  more  intercourse  with  anyone  but  the 
guest  who  sits  beside  you  than  if  you  were 
all  dining  at  the  same  restaurant ;  there  are 


LONDON    SOCIETY.  II3 

balls,  at  which  nobody  can  dance,  and  not 
all  can  get  upstairs ;  there  are  crushes  at 
which  you  are  jammed,  perhaps  in  a  sultry 
summer  evening,  and  struggling  against 
the  overpowering  buzz  to  talk  to  some  one 
against  whom  you  have  been  jammed,  but 
to  whom  you  do  not  want  to  talk  about 
something  which  you  do  not  want  to  talk 
about.  Perhaps  the  best  months  for  social 
enjoyment  are  those  which  precede  the 
beginning  of  "the  season,"  and  during 
which  parties  are  small,  while  of  those  who 
are  most  worth  meeting,  many  have  already 
been  brought  by  the  government  offices, 
the  law  courts,  or  other  professional  work 
to  town.  Of  course,  in  London,  as  in  every 
quarter  of  Vanity  Fair,  there  must  be  such 
vanities  as  Thackeray  describes.  There 
must  be  social  grades  with  their  jealousies 
and  heart-burnings  and  mean  ambitions. 
One  hears  of  an  aspirant  to  a  higher  gTade 
getting  some  great  lady  who  patronizes  her 
to  invite  the  guests  to  her  parties.  One 
hears  even  of  bribery  and  of  a  large  sum 
given  for  an  invitation  to  a  high-caste  ball. 
These  miseries  and  humiliations  are  excep- 
tional and  self-imposed  ;  in  every  vast  con- 
course of  pleasure-seekers,  there  must  be  a 
sense  of  hollowness.    It  is  something  to  feel 

H 


114  -^    TKir    TO    EXGLAXD. 

that  those  among  whom  you  live  "will  miss 
you  a  little  when  you  die.  In  such  a  world 
as  London,  nobody  can  be  much  missed 
when  he  dies.  One  would  prefer  at  all 
events,  to  end  life  in  the  country,  and  lay 
one's  bones  in  a  country  churchyard. 
Xothing  is  more  dismal  than  the  pomp  of  a 
funeral  struggling  with  its  mockery  of  woe 
to  the  "Necropolis"  through  the  tide  of 
business  and  pleasure  in  a  London  street. 

The  vastness  of  the  circle  and  the  light 
humour  of  a  pleasure-loving  society,  which 
makes  it  impatient  of  intellectual  display, 
are  likely  to  rather  interfere  with  the  ascend- 
ency of  great  talkers  such  as  reigned  forty 
or  fifty  years  ago.  Macaulay's  style  has 
been  often  described.  He  tm-ned  the  con- 
versation into  a  monologue  and  talked  di- 
luted essays,  wonderful  for  their  fluency, 
finish,  and  for  the  stores  of  information 
which  they  displayed,  but  naturally  re- 
garded as  a  bore  by  those  who  wanted  to 
talk  themselves,  and  sometimes  felt  to  be 
a  bore  even  by  those  who  wanted  only  to 
listen  and  be  amused.  It  was  provoking 
when  somebody  had  just  begim  a  good  story 
or  an  interesting  reminiscence  to  have  him 
silenced  by  a  flood  of  dissertation.  Macau- 
lay  had  a  wonderful  power  of  keeping  the 


INTELLECTUAL    SOCIETY.  II5 

talk  even  in  the  largest  company  to  himself, 
and  eating  a  very  good  dinner  at  the  same 
time,  Rogers  was  a  teller  of  stories,  which 
he  had  polished  to  the  highest  perfection, 
and  with  which,  at  a  dinner  party,  he  gen- 
erally entertained  the  men  when  the  ladies 
had  left  the  room,  amidst  a  silence  of  atten- 
tion which  it  was  highly  penal  to  break,  for 
never  was  there  a  self-love  more  sensitive 
or  a  bitterer  tongue.  Milman  was  a  very 
interesting  talker ;  he  was  a  little  learned 
perhaps  ;  but  his  talk  was  a  genuine  out- 
pouring, not  a  pedantic  display.  Sir  David 
Dundas,  now  forgotten,  was  the  most  charm- 
ing of  all ;  he  did  not  declaim  but  con- 
versed, and  drew  out  the  company  while  he 
displayed  his  own  gift.  After  all,  the  most 
popular  of  talkers  must  be  he  who  makes 
other  people  think  that  they  have  said  good 
things.  Hayward  was  an  anecdotist ;  and 
his  fit  audience  was  not  so  much  London 
society  as  a  party  in  a  great  country  house. 
Those  parties  in  the  great  country  houses 
are  the  reunions  which  most  nearly  corre- 
spond in  England  to  the  old  French  Salon. 
both  in  its  light  and  its  serious  aspect.  At 
The  Grange,  in  Hampshire,  a  party  of  this 
kind  used  to  be  assembled  by  Lady  i\shbur- 
ton,  whose  name  has  been  made  familiar  to 


Il6  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

US  by  the  Life  of  Carlyle  and  by  a  bio- 
graphical notice  from  the  pen  of  Lord 
Houghton,  himself  a  notable  Amphitryon. 
Lady  Ashbuiton  was  as  near  a  counterpart 
as  England  could  produce  of  the  great  lady 
of  France  before  the  Revolution,  and  was 
endowed  with  conversational  powers,  es- 
pecially with  a  power  of  repartee,  which 
fitted  her  to  be  the  head  as  well  as  the  host- 
ess of  her  brilliant  circle.  Conspicuous 
in  that  circle  was  Samuel,  Bishop  of  Oxford, 
the  Episcopal  side  of  whose  character  was 
not  the  only  side.  Among  men  of  the 
world  and  wits  Samuel  Wilberforce  was  a 
man  of  the  world  and  a  wit.  All  the  time 
no  doubt  he  persuaded  himself  that  he  was 
drawing  the  men  of  this  world  into  the 
Church's  fold  ;  but  which  way  the  real  at- 
traction was,  to  observers  at  Lady  Ashbur- 
ton's  dinner  or  breakfast-table,  seemed 
doubtful.  Carlyle  was  another  frequent 
visitor  and  a  prime  favourite  at  The  Grange, 
as  readers  of  the  Life  know.  He  poured 
forth  a  continuous  stream  of  cynicism,  as 
bitter  and  indiscriminate  as  the  east  wind, 
on  all  things  and  men.  There  was  no 
measure  or  sense,  though  there  was  often 
genius  and  gi-im  humour  in  what  he  said. 
You  were  struck  at  first  with  the  force  and 


SUBURBAN    LIFE.  11/ 

picturesqueness  of  the  language  ;  but  the 
exaggeration  and  the  monotony  of  the  per- 
petual jeremiads  wearied  most  of  his  hear- 
ers at  last. 

Some  of  the  gi'eat  mansions,  in  this  era 
of  gambling  speculation  when  fortunes  are 
quickly  Avon  and  lost,  have  had  strange 
tales  to  tell.  At  Kensington,  the  other  day, 
rose  a  pile  which  vied  with  Royalty,  but 
before  the  builder  could  take  up  his  abode 
in  it  the  gold  given  by  the  evil  genii  had 
melted  away.  One  of  the  great  mansions 
at  Albert  Gate  was  once  the  palace  of  the 
Railway  King,  who,  in  his  prosperous 
hour,  saw  in  his  halls  all  the  brightest  and 
proudest  of  the  land,  assembled  to  pay 
homage  to  Mammon,  and  perhaps  to  beg  a 
moment's  use  of  the  AUadin's  lamp  which 
makes  men  suddenly  rich.  The  Railway 
King,  who  set  out  an  honest  and  prosper- 
ous shopkeeper,  died  in  penury,  the  whole 
of  his  sinister  gains  having  been  wrung 
from  him  as  was  supposed  rmder  threat  of 
the  law. 

The  outskirts  of  London  are  full  of  villas, 
but  life  there  is  said  not  to  be  social.  For 
no  purpose  can  the  dwellers  of  those  villas 
be  brought  together.  The-  man  goes  up  to 
town  by  the  morning  train,  spends  his  day 


Il8  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

in  business,  comes  home  to  dinner  and  after 
dinner  reads  his  paper.  For  a  couple  of 
months  in  eacli  year  the  pair  go  off  to  lodg- 
ings by  themselves  at  the  seaside.  Such  is 
the  description  given  by  those  who  know 
suburban  life  well.  ]SIore  enjoyment  might 
be  had  at  a  less  price  than  that  for  which 
the  master  of  the  villa  spends  his  days  in 
toil,  and  here  again  we  seem  to  see  that 
what  is  called  progi-ess,  that  is,  increase  of 
wealth,  is  not  necessarily  increase  of  happi- 
ness. 

A  beautiful  city  London  cannot  be  called. 
In  beauty  it  is  no  match  for  Paris.  The 
smoke  which  not  only  blackens,  but  cor- 
rodes, is  fatal  to  the  architecture  as  well  as 
to  the  atmosphere.  Moreover,  the  luie 
buildings,  which  if  brought  together  would 
form  a  magniticent  assemblage,  are  scat- 
tered over  the  immense  city,  and  some  of 
them  are  ruined  by  their  surroundings. 
There  is  a  fine  group  at  Westminster,  and 
the  view  from  the  steps  under  the  Duke 
of  York's  column  across  St.  James'  Park 
is  beautiful.  But  even  at  Westminster 
meanness  jostles  splendour,  and  the  picture 
is  marred  by  Mr.  Hankey's  huge  Tower  of 
Babel  rising  near.  London  has  had  no 
Eedile  like  Hausmann.    The  Embankment 


CONSTITUTIONAL    FICTIONS.  1 19 

on  the  one  side  of  the  Thames  is  noble  in 
itself,  but  you  look  across  from  it  at  the 
hideous  warehouses  and  dirty  wharves  of 
Southwark.  Nothing  is  more  charming 
than  a  fine  water  street ;  and  this  water 
street  might  be  very  fine  were  it  not  marred 
by  the  projection  of  a  huge  railway  shed. 
The  new  Courts  of  Law,  a  magnificent, 
though  it  is  said  mconvenient,  pile,  instead 
of  being  placed  on  the  Embankment  or  in 
some  large  open  space,  are  choked  up  and 
lost  in  rookeries.  London,  we  must  repeat, 
has  had  no  sedile.  Perhaps  the  finest  view 
is  that  from  a  steamboat  on  the  river,  em- 
bracing the  Houses  of  Parliament,  Somerset 
House,  and  the  Temple,  with  St.  Paul's 
rising  above  the  whole. 

Westminster  is  the  centre  of  politics.  It 
may  be  said  historically  to  be  the  centre  of 
politics,  not  for  London  and  Great  Britain 
only,  but  for  the  civilized  world.  All  civil- 
ized nations  both  in  Europe  and  America, 
as  well  as  all  the  British  Colonies,  have  now 
adopted  the  constitution  which  was  here 
founded  and  developed,  with  a  single  head 
of  the  State  and  two  Chambers  ;  though 
with  regard  to  the  headship  of  the  State 
and  the  Upper  Chamber,  the  elective  has, 
in  the  most  advanced  politics,  been  substi- 


120  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

tilted  for  the  hereditary  principle,  while  in 
the  cases  of  the  United  States  and  Switzer- 
land there  is  a  federal  as  well  as  a  national 
element.  The  Roman  imposed  his  institu- 
tions with  arms  upon  a  conquered  world ; 
a  willing  world  has  adopted  the  mstitutions 
which  had  their  original  seat  at  West- 
minster. But  the  British  Constitution  now 
means  little  more  than  the  omnipotence  of 
the  House  of  Commons.  The  immense 
edifice  is  still  styled  the  palace  ;  but  the 
king  who  now  dwells  in  the  palace  is  the 
sovereign  people,  or  perhaps  rather  the 
sovereign  caucus.  If  you  chance,  which  is 
very  unlikely,  to  see  the  Queen  open  Par- 
liament, you  may  get  a  lesson  in  Constitu- 
tional Government.  There  she  rides  in  her 
gilded  coach  of  State,  with  the  State  coach- 
man and  horses,  with  lords  and  ladies  in 
waiting,  pages  and  equerries  surrounding 
her,  and  with  a  glittering  guard  of  cuiras- 
siers. Nominally,  that  lady  ratifies  or  re- 
jects all  legislation  at  her  good  pleasure,  at 
her  good  pleasure  makes  war  or  peace,  and 
herself  appoints  all  officers  of  State,  all 
judges,  all  commanders  by  land  and  sea. 
Practically  it  has  been  settled  that  she  has 
not  the  power  of  appointing  her  own  wait- 
mg-women.     The  authority  that  once  was 


THE    HOUSES    OF    PARLIAMENT.      121 

hers  now  vests  in  that  plainly  dressed  man 
in  the  crowd,  on  whom  no  train  attends, 
for  whom  nobody  makes  way,  to  whom,  it 
may  be,  no  one  doffs  his  hat.  The  speech 
which  she  reads  is  that  man's  speech, 
and  as  he  has  written  it  she  must  read  it. 
They  told  George  II.  that  a  wretch  had  pre- 
sumed to  counterfeit  the  King's  speech,  but 
he  would  soon  be  brought  to  justice.  "Let 
the  poor  fellow  alone,"  replied  the  King, 
"  I  have  read  both  speeches,  and  I  like  the 
counterfeit  much  the  best." 

That  the  Houses  of  Parliament,  with  the 
colossal  clock  tower  from  which  booms  Big 
Ben,  are  majestic  and  imposing  cannot  be 
denied.  Architecture  is  the  most  material 
of  the  arts,  and  in  its  productions  size  and 
costliness  go  a  long  way  even  without  gen- 
ius. The  river  front  has  been  with  too 
much  truth  compared  to  a  fender,  and  the 
elaborate  ornament  of  the  exterior  is 
doomed  to  be  spoiled  by  the  smoke.  Nor 
in  the  inside,  though  all  is  rich  and  magnifi- 
cent, is  the  effect  that  of  spaciousness  or 
grandeur.  The  halls  of  debate  are  too 
much  ornamented.  When  this  is  the  case 
attention  is  distracted  from  tlie  assembly 
and  the  speakers.  It  is  interesting  to  see 
the  constitutional  fiction  preserved,  as  it  is 


122  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLA>'D. 

even  in  the  Parliament  House  at  Ottawa, 
by  decorating  with  special  gorgeousness 
the  Chamber  of  that  House  which  has 
been  stripped  of  all  its  power.  The 
Celestial  Emperor  of  Japan  has  more 
than  one  counterpart  in  England,  ever  con- 
versative  of  forms.  Curiously  enough,  the 
collective  science  of  the  countiy  which  was 
applied  to  the  construction  of  those  Houses, 
failed  both  in  the  ventilation  and  the 
acoustics.  In  the  House  of  Lords  it  was  so 
difficult  to  hear  that  it  used  to  be  said  that 
members  went  out  to  buy  an  evening  paper 
that  they  might  learn  what  the  debate  was 
about.  The  Houses  are  divided  down  the 
middle,  in  conformity  with  the  Tarty  theory 
of  government,  the  Ministerial  sheep  being 
upon  the  right  of  the  [Speaker's  chair,  the 
Opposition  goats  upon  the  left.  The 
ancient  forms  meet  and  please  the  historic 
eye.  There  is  the  '-bauble,"  waiting  per- 
haps for  another  Cromwell,  when  govern- 
ment by  faction  shall  have  worn  out  the 
patience  of  mankind.  There  is  the  Speak- 
er's wig,  which  it  was  said  Sheridan  might 
have  plucked  off  with  impunity  after  his 
'•Begum  speech,"  so  transported  was  the 
house  with  his  eloquence.  There  is  the 
Sergeant-at-Arms  with  his  sword  to  defend 


ENGLISH   ORATORY.  I23 

the    Commons     against    the    bravoes    of 
Charles  I. 

A  debate  should  be  heard  if  possible  from 
a  seat  "under  the  gallery"  where  the 
spectator  is  on  a  level  with  the  speakers. 
In  the  gallery  you  miss  not  a  little  of  the 
play.  Hear  it  where  you  will,  a  debate  is 
no  longer  what  it  was  in  the  days  of  the 
Grand  Remonstrance,  in  those  of  the  great 
party  battles  which  raged  through  the  reigns 
of  "William  and  Anne,  or  even  in  those  of 
"Walpole  and  Pitt.  The  real  debate  then 
took  place  in  the  House,  and  the  struggle 
for  political  ascendancy  was  decided  by  the 
efforts  of  rival  speakers  on  that  floor.  The 
real  debate,  m  our  times,  takes  place,  not 
on  the  floor  of  Parliament,  but  in  the  open 
court  of  public  opmion.  Its  chief  organs 
are  not  Parliamentary  orators,  but  the  jour- 
nals whose  representatives  sit  yonder  in 
the  reporters'  gallery,  and  whose  oflices  on 
Fleet  Street  or  in  Printing  House  Square 
bespeak,  with  their  lighted  fronts,  the  work 
which  subtle  and  active  brains  are  carrying 
on  in  them  through  the  long  night  and 
almost  to  dawn  of  day.  The  speeches  de- 
livered in  the  House  of  Commons,  as  a 
rule,  are  hardly  intended,  much  less  ex- 
pected, to  turn  votes  ;  they  are  manifestoes 


124  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

addressed  fully  as  much  to  the  country  as 
to  the  House,  and  for  the  most  part  they 
contain  substantially  little  which  has  not 
appeared  in  the  morning's  editorials.  Still 
it  is  well  wortJi  the  stranger's  while  to  attend 
a  good  debate  in  the  House  of  Commons. 
If  he  can  get  admission  when  a  great  faction 
fight  is  going  on  and  the  fate  of  a  Ministry 
Is  trembling  in  the  balance,  he  will  find  the 
entertainment  at  least  as  good  as  a  play. 
The  average  of  speaking  is  not  so  high  in 
the  House  of  Commons  as  in  Congress  ; 
but  the  level  of  the  best  speakers  is  higher. 
American  oratory  almost  always  savours 
somewhat  of  the  school  of  elocution,  and 
has  the  fatal  drawback  of  being  felt  to  aim 
at  effect.  The  greatest  of  English  speakers, 
such  as  John  Bright,  the  greatest  of  all,  or 
Gladstone,  create  no  such  impression  ;  you 
feel  that  their  only  aim  is  to  produce  con- 
viction. 

Westminster  Abbey  is  pronounced  by 
Mr.  Freeman  the  most  glorious  of  English 
churches.  But  its  special  attraction  for 
the  stranger  is  that  which  it  possesses  as  the 
central  fane  of  the  English-speaking  race 
and  the  sepulchre  of  our  great  men.  Its 
character  in  this  respect  has  been  asserted 
by  the  erection  of  a  monument  in  it  to  an 


WESTMINSTER    ABBEY.  I  25 

American  poet  and  the  performance  of  a 
funeral  service  for  an  American  President 
beneath  its  roof.  Not  by  any  means  all  the 
great  men  of  England,  however,  are  buried 
in  Westminster  Abbey.  To  visit  Shake- 
speare's grave  a  special  pilgrimage  must  be 
made  to  his  own  Stratford-on-Avon,  with 
its  old  church  and  shady  church  walk,  the 
beloved  and  worthy  retreat  of  his  later 
years.  St.  Paul' s  holds  some  famous  graves : 
among  them  are  those  of  Wellington  and 
Nelson.  Peel  sleeps  among  his  family  at 
Drayton,  Cobden  in  a  country  churchyard. 
Selection  did  not  begin  early  enough  :  and 
among  the  illustrious  dead  are  obtruded  some 
dead  who  are  not  illustrious  and  yet  occupy 
an  immoderate  space  with  their  monuments. 
Some  of  the  monuments,  it  must  be  owned, 
might  with  advantage  be  removed  from  a 
Christian  Church  to  a  heathen  Pantheon, 
while  some  might  be  better  for  being 
macadamized.  Perhaps,  as  a  monument, 
nothing  in  Westminster  Abbey  is  so  strik- 
ing as  the  simple  sarcophagu.s  of  the  Duke 
of  Wellington  in  the  crypt  of  St.  Paul's. 

Law  has  now  migrated  from  Westminster 
Hall  to  the  New  Courts,  though  if  another 
Strafford  or  another  Hastings  were  to  be 
impeached,  the  great  judicial  pageant,  it  is 


126  A    TRIP   TO    ENGLAND. 

to  be  presumed,  would  be  again  exhibited 
in  Westminster  Hall.  But  here  also  we  are 
on  sacred  ground.  Here  were  preserved, 
though  under  rude  and  sometimes  half-bar- 
barous forms,  the  great  principles  of  justice, 
while  over  the  rest  of  Europe  prevailed  ar- 
bitrary tribunals,  secret  procedure,  impris- 
onment without  legal  warrant,  and  judicial 
torture.  Trial  by  jury  and  the  other  great 
judicial  institutions  of  England  have,  like 
her  political  institutions,  gone  round  the 
world.  English  Justice  still  keeps  its  scarlet 
and  ermine,  with  some  other  vestiges  of  an- 
cient state,  which  may  perhaps  be  displeas- 
ing to  the  severe  republican  eye.  But  with 
such  outward  lielps  to  reverence,  the  com- 
mon people  in  England  at  any  rate  cannot 
yet  afford  to  di.spense.  The  ermine  at  all 
events  is  stainless.  A  century  and  a  half 
ago  Lord  Macclesfield  was  impeached  and 
deprived,  not  for  selling  judgiuents,  but  for 
selling  offices.  Otherwise,  since  the  expul- 
sion of  the  Stuarts,  no  suspicion  has  ever 
been  breathed  against  the  incorruptibility 
of  an  English  judge. 

Of  all  nations,  with  the  possible  excep- 
tion of  the  Greeks,  England  has  produced 
the  greatest  and  the  finest  body  of  poetry. 


EXGLISn    ART.  1 27 

It  is  singular  that  she  should  have  produced 
so  little  comparatively  iu  the  way  of  art. 
Indifferent  to  art  she  certainly  is  not,  since 
she  has  just  given  seventy  thousand  pounds 
(•$350,000)  for  a  not  supremely  interesting 
Raphael.  How^ever,  in  the  National  Gal- 
lery, besides  a  general  collection  which  is 
allowed  to  be  very  fine  and  instructive,  will 
be  seen  some  native  paintings  which  seem 
to  show  that  the  training  and  direction 
rather  than  the  faculty  have  hitherto  been 
wanting.  There  will  be  found  the  best 
works  of  Turner,  the  supreme  genius  surely 
of  landscape  painting,  alone  in  his  power  of 
producing  on  canvas  what  a  poet  sees  in  na- 
ture. There,  too,  is  Gainsborough,  though 
his  "Blue  Boy,"  which  every  one  should 
make  a  point  of  seeing,  is  in  the  private 
collection  of  the  Duke  of  "Westminster. 
Hogarth  belongs  to  a  much  humbler  gi'ade, 
yet  few  paintings  are  more  pathetic  than 
the  last  in  the  series  of  "  Marriage  a  la 
Mode."  The  great  general  painters  are 
the  best  portrait  painters  :  Reynolds  cannot 
vie  with  Titian,  but  he  presents  to  us  in 
a  very  interesting  way  whatever  was  grace- 
ful, sweet,  and  half-poetic  in  a  polished  and 
refined  society.  The  late  Prince  Consort 
has  been  accused  of  meddlins;  with  things 


128  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

with  which  he  liad  better  not  have  meddled  ; 
but  he  gave  a  real  impulse  to  the  study  of 
art  in  all  its  grades.  Of  that  study  the 
great  centre  now  is  Kensington,  and  its 
home  is  marked  by  the  growth  of  buildings 
of  a  highly  festhetic  character.  It  would 
be  presumptuous  in  any  one  who  is  ignorant 
of  art  to  express  an  opinion  about  the  Ex- 
hibitions of  the  Royal  Academy.  Few  of 
us  perhaps  would  be  able  to  discern  how 
the  Masters  of  the  present  day  fall  below 
the  Old  ^Masters  in  technical  skill.  What 
to  the  unskilled  eye  seems  wanting  is  not 
greater  technical  skill,  but  more  interesting 
subjects.  The  power  of  expression  appears 
generally  to  exceed  the  wealth  of  ideas  to 
be  expressed.  The  religious  painters  of  the 
Middle  Ages  and  the  Kenaissance  had  never 
to  look  out  for  a  subject ;  the  modern 
painter  has  to  look  out  for  a  subject,  and 
he  not  seldom  lights  on  one  very  remote 
from  common  interest.  Happy  is  the 
stranger  who  gets  an  invitation  to  an  Acad- 
emy dinner ;  nowhere  will  he  hear  such 
after-dinner  speaking  or  see  so  many  men 
who  are  worth  seeing. 

It  is  curious  that  the  finest  extant  works 
both  of  Greek  and  Assyrian  art  should 
meet  under  the  same  roof  in  London.     Brit- 


SCIENCE    IN    ENGLAND.  1 29 

ish  adventure  has  rifled  the  world  ahnost 
like  Roman  conquest.  The  British  Mu- 
seum must  be  visited,  were  it  only  to  see 
the  scidpture  of  Phidias  and  those  brought 
by  Layard's  enterjDrise  and  energy  from 
Nineveh.  Greek  art  w^as  nothing  short  of  a 
miracle.  In  form  it  remains  supreme,  as 
he  who  looks  on  the  friezes  of  the  Parthe- 
non must  own,  though  in  depth  and  rich- 
ness of  sentiment  it  has  been  transcended 
by  the  widening  mind  and  deepening  heart 
of  humanity. 

If  Science  has  any  special  centre,  perhaps 
it  is  the  Royal  Institution  in  Albemarle 
Street,  over  which  Tyndall  lately  presided. 
There  at  all  events  the  great  men  lecture, 
and  there  you  can  most  easily  get  into  con- 
nection with  the  scientific  world.  Should 
the  British  Science  Association  be  sitting, 
there  would  be  an  opportunity  of  seeing  all 
the  most  eminent  men  of  science  at  once, 
and  at  the  same  time  of  visiting  some  inter- 
esting place  in  England  under  the  best 
auspices.  But  scientific  institutions  and 
facilities  of  all  kinds  abound ;  everywhere, 
and  not  least  in  the  literature  which  deals 
with  religious  belief  and  in  the  conversation 
of  the  educated  classes  on  that  subject,  you 
will  mark  the  rapid  and  resistless  advance 


130  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

of  the  power  which  seems  destined  in  the 
immediate  future  to  assume  the  guidance  of 
humanity. 

The  tradition  that  Englishmen  enjoy  their 
pleasures  very  sadly  runs  on  like  the  tra- 
ditions that  they  shoot  themselves  in  No- 
vember and  sell  their  wives.  But  the  Eng- 
lish will  now  be  hardly  found  wanting  in 
the  love  of  pleasure.  They  have  in  fact 
become  an  eminently  pleasure-seeking  and 
excitement-loving  people.  Since  the  Great 
Exhibition  of  1851,  which  drew  to  London 
everybody  who  could  afford  it  and  a  good 
many  who  could  not,  there  has  been  a  pas- 
sion for  excursions,  and  every  show  place 
is  now  inundated  by  the  crowds.  London 
has  theatres  in  abundance,  and  every  imag- 
inable equipment  of  pleasure.  The  out-of- 
door  gaiety  of  the  Boulevards  is  of  course 
impossible  in  that  climate.  It  is  on  the 
ISIarine  Parade  at  Brighton  or  at  one  of  the 
favourite  watering-places  that  something 
like  the  aspect  of  the  Boulevards  will  be 
found.  A  Frenchman  finds  the  Sunday 
terribly  dull ;  but  he  may  solace  himself  to 
some  extent  by  a  trip  to  Richmond  Terrace 
with  its  glorious  view,  to  Greenwich  Park, 
to  Hampton  Court,  or  some  other  junketing- 


ENGLISH    PLEASURE-SEEKING.       I3I 

place  in  the  neighbourhood  of  the  metrop- 
olis. The  London  Parks  themselves,  filled 
with  citizens  and  their  families  on  a  fine 
evening,  present  London  life  perhaps  in  its 
pleasantest  aspect.  Those  Parks  are  un- 
equalled of  their  kind,  especially  since  the 
Board  of  Works  has  improved  their  walks 
and  made  them  gay  with  paterres  of  flowers. 
They  are  superior  to  the  Central  Park  at 
New  York  in  having  broad  lawns,  stately 
shade  trees,  and  large  sheets  of  water ;  but 
above  all  in  being  in  the  centre  of  the  city. 
Not  only  are  they  the  recreation-grounds, 
but,  together  with  the  numerous  squares, 
they  form  the  lungs  of  London.  Nor  are 
they  less  essential  to  the  moral  than  to  the 
physical  health  of  the  people,  especially  of 
the  young,  who  would  otherwise  be  driven 
to  the  amusements  of  the  streets,  as  our 
children  will  be  in  Toronto,  when  cruel 
folly,  to  save  a  trifling  sum  of  money,  shall 
have  deprived  us  of  the  Queen's  Park.  It 
is  sad  to  hear  that  the  Crystal  Palace  at 
Sydenham  is  in  imminent  danger  of  being 
closed.  To  the  name  "  Crystal,"  the  strict 
devotees  of  the  Lamp  of  Truth  have  perhaps 
been  right  in  taking  exception  ;  but  the  place 
with  its  splendid  gardens  is  a  magnificent 
palace  of  the  people.     A  fete  at  Versailles 


132  A    TRIP    TO    ENGLAND. 

in  the  time  of  Louis  XIV.  got  up  at  lavish 
expense,  was  enjoyed,  as  the  old  prints 
show  us,  by  a  few  hundreds  of  privileged 
courtiers.  A  fete  at  the  Crystal  Palace  is 
enjoyed  by  myriads.  Here  at  all  events  is 
progress  in  happiness. 

The  grand  popular  fete  in  England,  as 
everybody  knows,  is  the  Derby,  and  the 
curious  may  go  from  London  to  Epsom  to 
see  it  as  they  would  go  to  see  a  bullfight  in 
Spain.  In  point  of  wholesoraeness  there  is 
unhappily  not  much  to  choose  between  the 
two  exhibitions.  l*robably  the  bullfight  is 
the  less  extensively  demoralizing  of  the  two. 
The  Turf  in  England  is  now  neither  more 
nor  less  than  a  vast  national  gambling- 
table,  of  which  the  devil  is  the  croupier, 
and  at  which  multitudes  of  gamblers  take 
their  places  and  meet  their  ruin  who  know 
nothing  about  horses  and  perhaps  have 
never  seen  a  race.  You  can  hardly  take 
up  a  country  newspaper,  especially  in  the 
North  of  England,  without  being  made 
aware  by  its  sporting  column  of  the  prev- 
alence of  this  degrading  and  deadly  mania. 
If  Agrarianism  would  pass  its  plough  over 
all  the  race-courses  it  would  confer  an  un- 
mixed benefit  on  the  nation. 


SLAVES    OF    CIVILIZATION.  1 33 

In  enjoying  the  pleasures  of  London  or 
any  other  great  city,  let  us  not  forget  the 
multitudes  who  minister  to  them,  and  whose 
own  share  of  them  is  often  small.  Let  us 
not  be  unkind  to  "Cabbie."  Something 
has  been  done  for  him  of  late,  but  his  lot  is 
still  a  hard  one,  and  few  of  the  slaves  of 
civilization  perhaps  have  a  better  claim  to 
compassion.  He  must  sit  on  his  box  in  all 
weathers,  often  drenched  to  the  skin,  racked 
with  rheumatism,  yet  obliged  to  drive  on. 
To  be  near  his  stable  he  must  live  in  mis- 
erable quarters,  for  which  he  pays  very 
high.  Hardly  ever  can  he  get  an  hour  in 
his  home.  Sometimes  he  takes  to  night- 
work,  as  his  only  chance  of  seeing  his  wife 
and  children  in  the  day.  He  drives  you 
very  safely  on  the  whole  through  the  press 
of  vehicles,  though  in  the  height  of  the  sea- 
son, besides  the  regular  cabmen,  a  number 
of  ephemeral  "butterflies  "  are  put  on  with 
very  miscellaneous  drivers.  Inquiry  will 
show  that  as  a  rule  the  cabman  is  respecta- 
ble, and  brings  up  his  children  as  well  as 
he  can.  His  general  honesty  is  proved  by 
the  great  number  of  articles  left  in  cabs 
and  brought  by  the  drivers  to  Scotland 
Yard.  He  is  almost  invariably  civil  to  you 
if  you  are  not,  like  too  many,  uncivil  to 


134  A    TRIP    TO   ENGLAND. 

him.  His  legal  fares,  it  is  believed,  hardly 
do  more  than  pay  for  the  hire  of  his  cab 
and  horse,  so  that  he  must  subsist  practi- 
cally on  his  gi-atuities.  Do  what  he  will  it 
appears  that  his  end  too  often  is  the  work- 
house. 

A  tribute  to  philanthropic  London  will 
fitly  close  this  paper.  It  may  be  paid  in  no 
unstinted  measure,  as  the  number  of  great 
hospitals  and  charitable  institutions  proves. 
Of  that  let  the  stranger  remind  himself  if 
he  is  tempted  to  censoriousness  when  he 
looks  on  the  social  sores  and  plague-spots 
of  the  Old  "World.  Hitherto  in  this  New 
AVorld  there  has  been  room  enough  and 
plenty  for  all.  Yet  we  are  not  exempt  from 
the  social  problems.  They  begin  to  con- 
front us  even  now. 


THE    END. 


INDEX. 


— • — 

PAGE 

Aldershot 60 

Belford  Regis 76 

Blenheim  Palace 40 

British  Museum 129 

Buckingham  Palace 54 

Cambridge 43 

Cathedrals 18 

Celts  (The) 9 

Chivalry 33 

Church  Architecture 17 

Clovelly 79 

Coventry 81 

Eleanor's  Crosses 25 

Elizabethan  Manor  Houses 35 

England  in  the  Middle  Ages 15 

Epsom 132 

Feudal  Castles 27 

Georgean  Age 41 

Grasmere 78 

Hampton  Court 57 

Henley 82 

Highlands  (The) 79 

Killarney 79 

London 97 

Manchester 87 

Monasteries 22 

135 


136  INDEX. 

PAGE 

National  Gallery 127 

Xew  Forest 34 

Old  City  Walls 31 

Oxford 43 

Pall  Mall 110 

Tarish  Churches 20 

Piiblic  Schools oO 

Roman  England 10 

Saltaire 87 

Saxon  England 12 

Snowdon 78 

Stonchenge £ 

Stratford  on  Avon 81 

Stuart  Age  (The) 38 

Temple  Church  (The) 32 

Tower  (The) 5£ 

Warwick 81 

Westminster  Abbey 124 

Windsor 56 

Wolverhampton 84 


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3   11 


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58  00425  0998 


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